Authors: Julie Cohen
‘What’s that?’
I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s too early, and I know what Quinn is like. But today has been
so great and he’s done it all for me. It seems mean to keep anything to myself when it could give him pleasure.
‘My period’s late.’
Quinn slowly puts down his spoon. ‘It is?’
‘Yes. I only realized this morning when I was packing and I wondered if I should pack any tampons. So I counted, and it is.’
‘Felicity. Do you think you are?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve been doing enough of what we need to.’
‘That is fantastic.’
He looks as though he wants to jump up from his chair and plant a big kiss on my lips across the table. But he’s far too English and Wickham to do such a thing. He just sits there, smiling, looking at me, his eyes shining.
‘So in retrospect,’ I say, ‘it probably wasn’t a great idea for me to order this glass of wine.’
‘What? Oh, I see. You’re right.’ He pushes my glass
of wine away from me, and then does the same with his. ‘Do you really think …? Do you feel any different?’
‘Maybe. It’s hard to tell, seeing as we’re in New York all of a sudden.’
‘I hope it’s true,’ he says, and touches my hand on the table. ‘That would be – that would be everything, love.’
‘I can do a test tomorrow maybe. I’m assuming they have pregnancy tests in New York.’
‘They do,’ says
the woman at the table next to us. ‘Go to CVS. I’m sorry for eavesdropping, but these tables are so close together and I couldn’t help but hear the happy news. Mazel tov!’
‘Mazel tov!’ says her friend, also grinning.
‘Thank you,’ says Quinn. ‘And it’s our first anniversary.’
‘Oh!’ cries the woman’s friend. ‘What wonderful news. I won’t put a jinx on it by saying anything else, but I hope it
all works out for you.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Me too.’
Quinn stands up, leans over the table, and kisses me. Beside us, the other diners begin to applaud.
Here and now is perfect.
‘
WAKE UP, SUNSHINE
.’
I open one eye. Quinn is standing beside the bed. He’s had a shower and got dressed.
‘Mmph,’ I say, and pull the Egyptian-cotton hotel sheet up over my head.
‘It’s half past seven.’ Quinn gently pulls the sheet back down.
‘Half past seven? I only just got to sleep.’
‘I’ve ordered breakfast. It’ll be here any minute.’
‘I’ve got jet lag,’ I say. ‘I need to
sleep.’
‘Jet lag doesn’t work like that. It’s half past twelve in the afternoon in England, so if it’s jet lag, you should be wide awake.’
He’s been wide awake for hours. I can tell by just looking at him.
‘It’s a holiday, Quinn. Come back to bed.’
‘We came all the way to New York, and this is the only full day we’ve got. We’re not staying in bed.’
‘Isn’t that sort of what having an anniversary
is all about? Especially now while we’re still young enough to
do
fun stuff in bed?’
‘If we only wanted to do fun stuff in bed, we could have stayed at home.’
‘Yes, but fun stuff is so much more fun in a New York bed.’
He chuckles and kisses my forehead. ‘Definitely. Later. We’ve got breakfast and then I’ve bought us tickets for the Empire State Building.’
‘I’ve never been up the Empire State.’
‘Yes, exactly.’
I sit up and rub my eyes. My head feels woolly inside, despite my only having drunk half a glass of wine last night. ‘It is jet lag, you know. I always have to sleep a couple of days when significantly changing time zones.’
‘Coffee will sort you out.’ Whistling, he strolls to the television and turns it onto the news channel.
‘Do you have to go up the Empire State at a certain
time?’
‘No, but it’s less busy before nine o’clock. We’ve got plenty of time, if you get up now.’
‘Couldn’t we go later?’
‘Not without changing everything else.’
‘What is everything else?’
‘It’s a surprise. All stuff that you’ll like.’
I fall back onto the pillows. I knew this being-spontaneous thing wasn’t going to last. It was the same on our honeymoon: Quinn likes to plan. We went to
Sicily and he packed every minute full of interesting things to do. Yesterday was evidently my free-choice day, and today he’s filled up our entire schedule.
‘I just like New York beds,’ I say, pouting a bit.
There’s a knock at the door and Quinn opens it so a waiter can push in a little table, draped with a linen cloth and with silver-covered dishes. There’s a crystal vase with a rose in it,
two pots of coffee, and a jug of orange juice. At the smell of coffee and breakfast, my mouth starts to water. Travelling makes me hungry, even when there are important staying-in-bed-related principles at stake.
Quinn tips the waiter and closes the door after him. He pushes the table closer to the bedside and uncovers the dishes.
‘Waffles and bacon,’ I say.
‘With maple syrup.’
‘You remembered
that was my favourite American breakfast. In bed.’
‘And though I think it is a quite frankly insane combination, and I’m not mad about sticky syrup and crumbs on the sheets, I’m willing to put myself through it.’ He grins at me, and looks so pleased with himself that I have to smile back.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Sorry for being grumpy.’
‘Forgotten,’ he says, and hands me a plate. ‘We’ve got time
to pick up a pregnancy test, if you like. Though I think …’
‘Maybe it’s best not to know today, in case it’s not the right answer. Maybe it’s best to wait until we’re home.’
‘Exactly. Let’s concentrate on us.’ He picks up a piece of crispy bacon from his plate, dips it in maple syrup, and crunches it with a grimace on his face that makes me laugh.
Seven hours later I am grumpy again, though
I’m trying my best to hide it. We have ‘done’ mid-Manhattan with clockwork precision: Empire State, Times Square, Lincoln Center, Central Park. He’s let slip that he’s got theatre tickets for tonight, though he won’t tell me which show. Quinn has planned this break to the millisecond, and all of it especially for me.
He’s listened to me. He’s thought of me. He’s been absolutely entirely considerate
and loving to me, and he’s tickled pink that he’s able to do this really incredibly sweet and wonderful thing for me on a day when it’s not only our first wedding anniversary but when I may well be expecting our first child, too.
My feet are aching and I have indigestion from the hot dog that we shared from a street cart, but I’m not going to say anything. Quinn has worked hard to make me happy
and he deserves for me to be happy. If I’m not bowled over with joy, it’s not his fault. It’s mine.
‘This is the big thing,’ Quinn’s telling me. ‘This is why I decided we’d go to New York, actually. I’d been thinking about it for ages, but when I discovered this was happening, it made up my mind.’
‘What is it?’ I ask. We’re walking down a street, and I don’t see anything in particular. Nothing
that would tempt Quinn to fly me three thousand miles. Though that bookshop across the road looks interesting. I slow my pace to look at it, hoping he’ll take the hint.
‘It should be around this next corner.’ He tugs my hand in excitement and I have to hurry up if I don’t want to be positively pulled along.
We round the corner, and this street looks much like the last street, except without
the bookshop. And then I see the sign.
ESTHER BLOOM: AN INTERNATIONAL RETROSPECTIVE
I stop on the pavement. It’s one of those long banners, attached to the side of the gallery, with the lettering running vertically up it. At the top, there’s a reproduction of one of my mother’s pen and ink portraits. I dimly remember it being of one of our landlords.
‘You’ve taken me to my mother’s retrospective.’
‘Yes! Isn’t it a lucky coincidence? I never would have known it was even on this summer if I hadn’t seen it in the
New York Times
online. Did you even know this was happening?’
‘Yes.’
‘You did?’
‘I had an invitation. They wanted to fly me out here to be the guest of honour.’
‘And … you said no?’ Quinn’s face has fallen. I’ve completely ruined his big surprise for me.
‘No, I think I lost the
invitation,’ I say quickly. ‘Plus, I thought it was too far to come for basically one party.’
The second excuse is completely unbelievable, but the first is probable enough. Quinn still looks devastated.
‘You’ve never gone to any of the exhibitions of her work, have you?’ he asks. ‘Not since I’ve known you. I should have thought of that.’
I squeeze his hand. ‘I met you just after she died,
and it was too difficult then. It’s all right now.’
I am lying.
‘Really? Do – did you ever go to them?’
‘Yes, we used to go together, but even then it was a little weird. It was like sharing my mother with all these strangers. I ducked out of them when I could. But it’s fine now, Quinn. Really.’ I smile. It’s forced, but hopefully he won’t notice.
‘You don’t mind sharing it with me?’
‘Of
course not. I want to.’
Quinn hesitates. ‘I went … I went to an exhibition not long after I met you. I wanted to try to understand.’
‘Her, or me?’
‘Both. I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have; we’d only known each other a few weeks. It felt like snooping. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
It feels like snooping to me, too, but there’s no rational reason for it. My mother was an artist. Though
she belonged to me, her paintings and drawings were made to be shown. She wanted them to be shown. And Quinn wanted to know more about me. ‘Did you find out anything?’ I ask.
‘They were beautiful. A little terrifying, sometimes, but still beautiful. I felt that I might have liked her.’
‘You would have,’ I say truthfully, my throat tight.
‘We don’t have to go in.’
I gaze up at the building.
It’s large. Who knows how many memories it can hold. I want to close my eyes and run away. I want to take Quinn’s hand and go somewhere new with him, somewhere with no traces of anything I know.
‘Of course we have to go in,’ I say.
Even with my brave face on, I have to hold my breath when we walk into the gallery. All these pieces of my mother, all these visions she saw in her mind and created
with her hands. Along with the photographs in our loft and the ashes in my studio, these are all that’s left of her.
As an artist, my mother favoured large canvases; she painted her subjects several times bigger than life-size, the better to examine every flaw and beauty. The canvases line the tall white walls like frozen explosions of colour and feeling.
I wish they were all gone, that they’d
all been burned with my mother’s body. It’s unfair that they still exist when she doesn’t. It’s wrong that these people who are wandering through the rooms, who probably came in on a whim from the street, can see what she painted and think that this is all that she was. And the fans, the art connoisseurs, the collectors, the students, the curators are worse: they think they know her, they think
they own her. For a moment I hate them all and I want to scream at them to get out,
get out
, and leave us alone.
‘Are you all right, love?’ asks Quinn quietly. ‘We can go if you want.’
Quinn has brought me here, Quinn has planned this hoping to please me, and for Quinn’s sake, I can’t leave.
I let out my breath, and draw another one in. I dread the smell of linseed, but it isn’t there. It has
evaporated away, out of these paintings. Maybe if I put my face right up close to one, I would smell the odour I associate with Mum. But the gallery itself smells of floor polish, and that makes it easier for me to look.
I’ve never seen the painting closest to the door before. It’s the portrait of an elderly man, standing on an empty beach. He holds the skull of a bird in his hand. The small
sign next to the painting says it was done in 1982, before I was born. It should be easier to see a painting I don’t know, but it reminds me of all the time my mother existed and I never knew her. All the parts of her that I couldn’t hold on to if I wanted to. Mum usually got rid of her paintings as soon as she could. If necessary, she gave them away.
There could be a painting of my father here.
I wouldn’t even recognize it.
‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ asks Quinn, quite close to my shoulder. I follow his gaze across the room and there I am. I’m four years old and I’m sitting on the back of a baby elephant.
This is easier to see. I walk across the room, Quinn by my side, to look at it. In the painting, I’m draped in a green sari embroidered with silver thread. My fringe is too long and I
look straight at the viewer, as I looked straight at my mother when she was taking the photograph that she painted from.
‘Do you remember that?’ Quinn asks me, and I nod. ‘Were you in India?’
‘No, it was a circus. I think it was in Norwich.’
Quinn laughs. His laughter is never loud, but it’s the loudest thing in this hushed room. I gaze up at myself as a child. I remember sitting on that elephant
very well, because it stank. The hair on its back chafed against my bare legs and its skin was more wrinkled than anything I’d ever seen in my life before. It was entirely alien. Its trunk stretched back and touched my knee as if to check on this strange thing on its back. The sari had tiny bells stitched onto its bottom hem and every time the elephant moved, the bells chimed.
Up until I was
about fourteen years old, I believed that thirty seconds after that photograph was taken, the elephant started walking and I tumbled off it, straight into my mother’s arms. She stopped me from falling onto the straw-strewn concrete floor and then she put me down safely on my feet. But then at fourteen I fell off my bicycle and broke my arm, and when the doctor showed us the X-rays he commented on
the old, healed break in my radius. ‘Oh yes,’ said my mother, with that glimmer in her eye that meant she thought the doctor was fanciable, ‘that was when she fell off the elephant.’
The doctor laughed, as he was meant to, and I said, ‘But you caught me when I fell off the elephant that time.’