Authors: Polly Samson
Freda passes her the tin of biscuits, says: ‘How do you stay so thin?’
Julia shrugs, takes a couple of Hobnobs, waves one at Freda before dunking it: ‘These were Julian’s favourites, I once watched him eat a whole packet in one sitting.’
Freda is looking for snacks; she turns around with a pot of jam in her hand and grins at her. ‘Mentionitis!’
‘Actually, I was still thinking about horrible Chris, but . . .’ She pauses. ‘Yes, Julian
is
on my mind. I really must find a way to speak to him. I thought Karl would be here to help steer us through this Mira problem, but no.’ She stops for another moment and fiddles with her necklace. ‘I mean, we didn’t kid ourselves that coming back here might not stir things up for Mira. I can’t tell you how much I resent him staying behind.’
Freda gives up on her idea of a Ryvita thinly spread with diabetic jam and reaches for the Hobnobs. ‘Have you and Karl ever thought you should just explain it to her?’ she asks. ‘Let her sort out what she thinks?’
Julia spins the gold sun on its chain. ‘Just after we arrived in Connecticut we consulted a child psychiatrist. It did seem odd that she never ever mentioned Julian. The way she took so readily to Karl. I mean I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was also a relief, especially with Ruthie on the way.’
‘What was the advice?’
‘Oh, you know, to answer any questions she had as honestly as we could.’
‘But did you tell the shrink that Julian was refusing all contact?’
‘I didn’t imagine that would go on for ever. I don’t think any of us expected him to disappear,’ Julia says. ‘Anyway, the gist of the psychospiel was that any information should be fragmentary, not a big sit-down-and-listen-to-us thing, and that it should all be Mira-led, that she might easily start to ask questions later. He felt that what she’d been through at the hospital and the new baby was quite enough for her to cope with, and his advice was that we should wait until she asked.’
She picks up a pencil and starts shading in shadows at the bases of trees, around the feet of a small cluster of people she’s drawn drinking coffee beneath the canopy of leaves. ‘She did ask for him for a while, and then she stopped,’ she says.
But what if she had gone on asking? It seemed unthinkable that Julian would be so cruel. In Lamb’s Conduit Street, Karl had been trying his phone constantly but only got the machine every time. When the tape was finally full he borrowed Heino’s car and drove to Firdaws. He got no answer when he knocked on the door and all the curtains were drawn, though he swore he could hear the dog.
Julia moved out of Ellie’s room. She and Karl were both sleeping on the top floor. Chastely. She slept, or rather tried to sleep, with Mira beneath the primrose quilt of the guest room and Karl next door in his boyhood bed, his Airfix planes circling. For several days she couldn’t bear for Karl to touch her; the only place she found any peace was the bath. She thought the pain might never recede the night Mira sobbed and asked for her Dadoo. She lay in the dark while tears large as pearls rolled into her ears.
It was two days before she got hold of Jenna, who at last called her back but coldly refused to say what was happening with Julian, only that he wanted her gone from Firdaws: ‘Every last trace, do you hear me? You and the child.’ From her tone you’d have thought she was talking about an infestation of rats. Julia could imagine her having the place exorcised afterwards, burning sage in the corners.
It winded her most of all to hear Mira reduced to ‘the child’. It was a struggle to know what to say. ‘But Jenna, wouldn’t you like to see Mira? You will always be her . . .’ But Jenna cut her off before she could say the word ‘grandmother’. ‘My heart can’t take this, Julia. So, no, thank you,’ she said. ‘Now, how soon can you get to Firdaws?’
They hired a van and her brother, Howie, agreed to drive her and do the hulking. While she and Howie set off for Firdaws, Karl stayed at Lamb’s Conduit Street with Heino and Mira, trying every number he could think of for Julian, eventually reaching Michael at his office, who informed him that Julian was in hospital receiving treatment for suspected meningitis, but, with great civility, refused to tell him where.
Julia was too exhausted to think about any of it, slept the sleep of an invalid in the van. Howie drove in silence, only shaking her hours later when he needed to check the directions from the crossroads at Horton Station.
To her awakening eyes it was no less miraculous than the moment
The Wizard of Oz
turns Technicolor. The trees had been quite bare when she was last in the village and the fields still muddy. But now, beneath a cloudless sky, high grassy banks were bursting with leaf and flower. The tarmac flared with bright sunlight between spreading branches that made a green tunnel of the road. Down the hill and first left. Flowers flashed by in the hedgerows: pink campion, buttercups, frothing Queen Anne’s Lace and dog roses. As they cleared the humpback bridge, the long bend of the river came into view, spreading itself like mercury through the valley.
Firdaws stood alone in a sea of wildflowers. The roses were in full bloom; ‘New Dawn’ rambled across the bricks, around the windows and the front door, dropping petals of tender palest pink, one or two splashed darker pink by the rain. The brickwork was a mellow ground for the brocade of leaves, the roses – some blown almost to white – and twining clematis that hung purple stars from the lintels. Everything was still slightly steaming and glistening from that morning’s drenching. Beyond the house the fields rolled away, rippling green and rich, gleaming with buttercups. It was quite breathtaking to see it in the sunshine, to smell the petrichor of recent rain and warm dust. She wound down her window as soon as they pulled up, had forgotten how sweet air could taste. The birdsong was almost deafening as she stepped from the van, her brother already unloading the empty packing cases. The smell of the wet warm earth made her heart ache, camomile and cornflowers brushed the backs of her legs. Swallows and house martins darted across the sky, she could hear the squeak of nestlings from the eaves. She looked at the windows, at the old frames in their chipping layers of forget-me-not-blue paint. A shower of petals fell on to Mira’s toy pram. Julia stopped at the door and folded back the knitted blankets to check they weren’t damp. Wee-Ro-Ro was tucked up inside. She imagined Julian wheeling the little pram back out here, washing the pearly knitted blankets at the sink, the care he’d have taken to make it seem to Mira that she had never been away. It was unbearable, all of it.
She looked up from the pram when she heard the door open. Katie emerged from the house, shrieking her name as though they were old friends. She was wearing a white sundress and her ponytail appeared extra blonde and swingy as Julia attempted to sweep past her to get inside. Katie tried to follow her. ‘I’ve only come to change the sheets, is that OK?’
‘Just leave me alone,’ Julia said, attempting to hold back her tears.
Packing away the photographs was the worst of it. Julia wouldn’t have had the heart to take them at all, but Jenna had been quite specific. Howie was outside working up a sweat strapping Julia’s few bits of furniture to the roof, the van already full of boxes. Mira’s high chair toppled above the pea-shoot-green chairs and a small chest of drawers from Cromwell Gardens that she’d painted with gold leaf. As it turned out, there wasn’t much that was hers.
She grew numb with unhappiness as she stood in Julian’s den going through all the photos. Only the pictures from the few months after Mira’s birth were arranged in an album, everything else remained in polythene packets that had been laughed over, sighed over, and put away until the day when one of them would find a spare moment. They never had. They never would. The photos were stacked in two bulging shoe-boxes, in rough date order. The empty albums waited patiently beside them, a set of half a dozen, handsome and leather-bound, Michael’s present to them at Mira’s birth. Julia took just the one, quickly turning the pages. Mira’s arrival, too heartbreaking to see her in Julian’s arms like that; various family groupings around the bed; Mira’s first smile; Mira playing peek-a-boo with her big nappy in the air and legs as bandy as sausages; sitting propped and importantly chinned between cushions at Cromwell Gardens or twirling in her baby bouncer, her brow creased with concentration. Julia gathered them all, checked drawers and cupboards for strays and found a few from when they owned a Polaroid. She felt the greatest twinge as she removed the framed pictures of Mira from his desk and from his side of the bed.
She didn’t have long to dwell. As she took a last look around she was interrupted by voices. Through a gap in the curtains she saw Howie following Katie across the grass. Katie’s white dress swung as she walked. She saw her come to an awkward stop at the open front door, the folds of white muslin settling around her legs.
Again Katie tried to waylay her: ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ Julia swept past her to the van with Howie rushing to take the boxes from her. As they drove away, Katie stood at the front of the house, hands on her hips, and Julia dwelt on the five albums she’d left behind, their creamy blank pages.
You’d think it would be hard to remove every trace of yourself from a life, but really, it isn’t.
Claudine has waited up for her though it’s past midnight when she gets back from Freda’s. Claudine is wearing a yellow dress, a vintage one, with a daisy-chain belt. Her spiky hair is dip-dyed white at the tips, she looks like a little porcupine as she stretches and yawns. Her face, bare of its usual dark eye make-up, is as sweet as a principal boy’s. There’s nothing to dislike about Claudine, except maybe the large silver tongue stud that makes her lisp.
‘We’ve had a fantastic day,’ Claudine says. ‘But if they tell you about it, make sure you know it was my fault we almost got chucked out of the V&A.’
Julia is pouring milk into a pan. ‘What? Why? And do you want hot chocolate? I’m making some for myself.’
‘Yes, please,’ says Claudine. ‘Oh, the security man was overreacting. There was an extremely tempting vacant plinth on the main staircase. It was sort of spotlit, you know? Light falling in a beam from the window. And I had my new camera.’
‘Oh, Claud, you didn’t?’
Claudine giggles. ‘The girls take direction well. We did
The Kiss
and
Romulus and Remus
before he came flying up the steps. I thought they would be upset at being told off, but not a bit of it. We spent the rest of our time pretending to be fugitives from justice.’
‘I hate to say it, but you’re a very bad influence,’ Julia pretends to admonish as Claudine continues: ‘I’ve got the photographs downstairs and they’re cracking. We must find a way to email them to Karl. Oh, by the way, he’s been calling. I told him to try you at Freda’s.’
Julia joins Claudine at the table, blowing on her cup. ‘My stupid phone won’t work in the UK and I haven’t found a minute to do anything about it,’ she says. She’s sure the phone hadn’t rung once at Freda’s. Well, let him stew for a while longer. She decides not to call back.
‘Any other calls for me here?’ she asks, allowing herself to feel hopeful. Claudine shakes her head and Julia tries not to look crestfallen. She turns to the clock and checks the time. Too late now. She’ll have to wait until breakfast to try Firdaws again. She gulps down the remains of her hot chocolate.
Upstairs the girls are sleeping peacefully, Karl’s Airfix fleet watching over them. Julia bends to kiss Ruth’s cheek, she smells of sweets and warm milk. She leans across to sweep the hair from Mira’s face. Mira makes a snuffling noise and turns away. Ruthie smiles in her sleep. Julia suffers a rush of tenderness gazing at her younger daughter. She is overcome with yearning as she bends once more to Ruth, rests her hand on her brow, whispers: ‘I love you.’
Julia had been crazy with anxiety and tiredness, truly out of her mind, the night Ruth was conceived – conceived in this very bed, as it happened. Julia had hardly slept at all for the first two nights of Mira’s descent into sedation and Intensive Care. Julian was beside her, both of them sleeping fitfully, slumped into chairs beside Mira’s bed. She needed him too much, was too full of fear for Mira to contemplate what was happening between him and Katie. On the third night the nurses insisted she go back to Lamb’s Conduit Street for a good night’s sleep and she found herself glad to leave him behind. She wasn’t expecting to see Karl’s coat hanging in the hall when she got there, had no idea that Heino had called him in Connecticut to alert him to Mira’s decline. Julia sniffed Karl’s collar to confirm, though she already knew it was his. She stood there for a while with the tock of the grandfather clock and pressed the fabric to her face, the smell of him almost painful.
She thinks of Karl that night, his look of surprise when she came naked across the room, the draught from the door making his model planes spin. Afterwards they stared up at the bobbing planes, shaking their heads in disbelief, the frenzy absolute.
She feels the familiar deep ache just thinking about him now. Sometimes her mood seems to have little to do with her desire for Karl and on the nights he’s made her furious she wonders if it is, as he once claimed, just an anatomical quirk: ‘Simply a perfectly angled meeting of nerve endings, of Gräfenberg spot and penile raphe,’ he said. Whatever it was, they were always left sweat-soaked and reeling.
Batteries! Julia sprints to the corner shop leaving the girls in the kitchen in their vests and pants eating croissants. Mira is furious, indignant that anyone would expect her to travel the five hours to Vernow in a car without her Walkman and the stories she can recite by heart.