I
SEE
, driving there through the gray afternoon, how lavish all the borders are after so much rain and sun, how even the tidiest
gardens look overgrown.
I stand on his doorstep and ring the bell, and the gray warm air wraps round me. There’s a musky, intimate smell where the
hawthorn has been rained on. I’m suddenly afraid. There’s part of me that hopes there’ll be no answer. I’m turning round to
go when he opens the door.
He’s wearing one of those baggy shirts, and his hair is unruly, as though he’s just run his hands through it. He looks at
me; he doesn’t smile. He doesn’t seem surprised.
I suddenly feel I have no fight to be here. “I’m sorry — are you busy?”
“I’m writing a rather worthy piece on the politics of coffee.”
“I won’t come in, then.…”
“Of course you’ll come in,” he says, standing aside to let me through. “Trust me, I can handle this kind of interruption.”
I follow him through to the back room. On this clouded afternoon, it seems more ordinary and smaller than before.
I go to the window. Jamie and a friend of his are somersaulting on the climbing frame. Everything’s further on since last
I came here. There’s a ragged mist of thistledown on the lawn, and in the borders under the prunus a tangle of docks and bluebells.
The flowers are a soft faded blue, as though they’ve been soaked in water.
“It all needs cutting back,” he says. “There are things in that lawn that really shouldn’t be there.”
“I like it as it is.”
He smiles at me and pushes up his shirtsleeves. I’m very aware of his skin, of the fine fair hairs on his arms.
“This is great timing,” he says, as though my presence here is the most natural thing. “I was going to give you a ring — I’ve
got that name for you.”
“The doctor?”
He nods. “A gastroenterologist who specializes in children. You’ll have to get your GP to refer you.” He rifles through a
heap of papers on top of the bookcase. “Here.”
He’s written the name on an envelope: someone from Great Ormond Street. I put it in my bag.
“I’m really grateful,” I tell him.
“It seemed the least I could do.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ll have some wine,” he says.
I notice that he doesn’t ask if I want it: as though we already have our rituals, the ways we usually do things. As though
he knows what I want.
He goes to the kitchen, brings a bottle and glasses. As he hands me mine, our fingers touch around the cool bowl of the glass.
There’s a little silence. I don’t know where we go from here. With relief, I remember the picture.
“I brought a drawing, like you said.” I take it out of my bag. I glance at it for a moment, the child with the angular hands
who’s reaching out of the picture. I’m not sure now why I wanted him to see it. It seems raw, unfinished. I feel a kind of
shame, that I could presume to imagine that anyone would like it. But it’s too late to turn back now. “This is the kind of
thing I’m doing now. I guess they’re rather weird.”
He takes it, smoothing out the creases at the corners. I watch his hands moving across my picture.
“It’s very different to what you did before.”
Perhaps he doesn’t like it the way he liked the flower. I glance away from him, looking along the bookshelves, nervously reading
off the titles of the books. I feel opened up, exposed. He holds my picture in front of him and looks at it. This seems to
take an age.
“It’s very powerful,” he says.
Powerful. No one ever called my drawing that before. In spite of everything, I feel a surge of pleasure.
He props it up on his mantelpiece. It’s oddly intimate, to see my drawing there, surrounded by his things.
“Now we can see it properly,” he says.
He’s right: It looks different there. I see it as someone else might see it, see how acute the child’s face is, how urgent
and alive.
“Can I keep it?” he asks.
I’m surprised. “Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve done lots of them.”
“There’s someone I know,” he says, “who has a gallery. I’d like to show it to him.”
There’s a brief, astonishing thrill — like the glitter of a fish I once saw in a summer river, leaping right out of the water
and into the sun. But then the old familiar doubts crowd in.
“But he wouldn’t be interested, surely? I mean, I’ve never had any training — I just did a bit of drawing at school.…”
He’s looking at me, his head on one side, a little smile at my self-deprecation playing across his face. I bite back all the
things I was going to say. I let myself smile too.
“I’d love you to,” I tell him.
“I’ll give him your number, then — is that OK?”
“Of course. You take me so seriously?”
“Yes,” he says.
We sit there for a while. The children shout in the garden. Light from the window falls across his body: his strong pale arms,
the curve of his hand round the glass.
“What’s happening with the doctors?” he asks then.
“We’re seeing the psychiatrist.”
He frowns. “You decided to go?”
“I couldn’t see a way out. But I hate it,” I tell him. “I feel she’s always judging me.”
“I’m sure she is,” he says.
“I feel so trapped. That for Daisy’s sake we have to do as we’re told. That if I protest, it’ll only make things worse for
her.…” I see how his mouth turns down when I say this. I wish I had his certainty, that I wasn’t so afraid. “Everything seems
so simple to you,” I say, a little accusingly.
“That’s probably true,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“Richard thinks she’s good. He just won’t listen to me.” I sense Fergal’s eyes on my face, but I don’t look at him. I’m talking
on, thinking about Richard: talking to myself, really.
“I thought I really knew him. I mean, I’ve always felt our marriage was so strong.…” My voice is very low. “A bit traditional,
rather old-fashioned, perhaps. But that it all worked fine.”
“Yes,” says Fergal quietly.
“I just don’t get it — why he never listens.” There’s a kind of clarity here, in this Still room, as though I can see further
than before.
“Maybe …” My voice fades. “Maybe I don’t understand him as well as I thought I did. Maybe there are things I don’t know about
him.…”
Fear moves across my mind like smoke from a hidden fire, making new shapes that I don’t want to look at. He senses this, perhaps.
For a while he doesn’t say anything, just fills up my glass. He waits for me to say more. I shake my head a little. Outside,
the boys have stopped shouting for a moment. Birdsong spirals down from the warm, wide sky.
“Tell me how Daisy is,” says Fergal then.
“She’s just the same.” I see her in my mind as she was when I left her, thin and still and unhappy. “You know — sometimes
I have these mad thoughts. That someone’s cursed us — that someone’s got it in for us. Such things aren’t possible, are they?”
I think he may laugh at me. But he’s thoughtful, considering this. “No. But I can see how you might think that.”
“I mean, I can really understand … like people a long time ago, when they had a miscarriage or their cow died, and they thought
it was a curse. Crazy thinking, really.”
“If someone was cursing you,” he says, “who might it be?”
And, when I hesitate, “Catriona, I didn’t mean to upset you; you really don’t have to answer.”
But I’ve answered it already, here in the silence: smelling her smell of nicotine and lily of the valley, hearing the jangle
of her gilded bracelets.
He reaches out and touches me, his hand just brushing the bare skin of my arm.
“You look so sad,” he says. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
His touch confuses me.
I pick up my bag. “I think I ought to go.”
“You don’t have to,” he says.
“I’m keeping you from your work.…”
“Believe me, I can cope with that,” he says.
I get up anyway.
He follows me to the hall. We’re standing close together; the hall is narrow. His gaze pulls at me. I’m looking anywhere but
at him. If I look at him, I think, something will happen, something irrevocable.
“Catriona.”
I lift my eyes to his. He reaches out and takes my hand and raises it to his mouth. Very slowly, he kisses the palm of my
hand. I hear myself gasp. The sensation shakes me; all the nerve endings in my body are in the skin of my hand. His eyes are
on me; his look has an absolute seriousness. And as he looks he kisses the tips of my fingers, pressing my fingers against
and into his half-opened mouth. The quick thin heat runs through me. Just for a moment, I forget everything.
There’s nothing to be said now. I go without saying good-bye.
In the car driving home past the blue disordered gardens, I feel the sensations of making love to him, his mouth pressed into
mine, the thrill as he eases into me, as though this is something I remember. It has a vividness beyond what can be imagined,
as though it has happened already.
A
NOTHER POSTCARD COMES
. It’s a picture from before the Wall came down. The Wall is in the foreground. It’s covered with graffiti — trolls and exuberant
monsters and spotted cartoon snakes, in pinks and yellows. And there are lots of slogans in German that I don’t understand,
apart from “Soldaritat,” and, in little white letters on the dark rim at the top, “God loves you.” Behind the wall, there’s
a wide desolate space, a no-man’s-land of mud and earth and tarmac, with very tall lamps like in a sports arena. In the distance,
against the cloudy sky, there are tenements like gray boxes.
Under her phone number she’s written an e-mail address and ringed it in purple pen.
“So how are you, my darling? Every time the phone goes, I think it might be you. Well, I’m sure one day it will be!
“You’ll see I’ve gone on e-mail now. Quite keeping up with the times. Do you have e-mail, darling? Well, I’m sure you do.
I must say, I’m really quite a convert. It’s the easiest thing in the world to send someone a line!
“I chose the picture for your little girl. I hope she likes the animals! Thinking of you, as ever.”
The picture would be perfect for Sinead’s cities project, but I bury it at the bottom of the bin.
T
HERE’S A SUDDEN MASSING OF CLOUDS
as tall as towers; then, just as we get to the clinic, the rain begins, spattering on the gravel in the car park. I have
an umbrella. Richard runs ahead and waits for me in the entrance. His hair is wet, sleeked down. He pushes it back from his
forehead with his hand; raindrops fall from it.
We wait in the bland waiting room, among the copies of
Hello!
, and I watch Jane Watson’s door and feel the beat of my heart. Exactly on time, she opens her door and ushers us into her
room. Today her hair is loose, just grazing her shoulders. She takes our coats and hangs them on her door, on top of a smart
black trench coat that is presumably hers. We talk about the weather — is it global warming, perhaps, that causes these heavy
storms? As she moves, her hair swings out, and her sandalwood smell brushes against me.
We sit down and she switches on her tape recorder.
“So — how are things?” she asks.
I tell her how Daisy has been.
She nods and murmurs something sympathetic.
She talks to Richard for a while about Sinead and Sara. It sounds, she suggests, as though they’ve worked out an excellent
modus vivendi: It’s an achievement — not everybody can manage this. I sit quietly while they talk, feeling a sense of reprieve.
But then she turns toward me, her face serious, intent.
“I’ve been thinking about our session last week,” she says. She leans back in her chair, in that pose she likes, her elbows
on the arms of the chair, her fingertips lightly touching. “We talked about your mother’s death, Catriona, and I realized
I was left feeling quite unsure how that affected you.…”
She leaves a little space, for me to fill.
“It’s a while ago now,” I tell her.
“Of course,” she says. “But the loss of your mother is always a huge event in anyone’s life. Perhaps one way in would be for
you to tell me what your mother was like when you were a child: how you remember her.”
I hesitate. It’s such an obvious question, but I have nothing to say.
“I know this will be painful for you, Catriona.” Her voice is silkily empathic. “That when we talk about somebody we’ve lost,
in a sense we’re reliving that loss.”
I try to shrug, as if this is nothing to me. My back is rigid, set.
“It’s not that. It’s just that there’s nothing special to say.”
I realize I am sweating. I wonder if she can see the spike of my pulse in my wrist.
“What kind of a woman was your mother?” she asks.
“She was … quite pretty.” I flail around. “She was always very suntanned. She liked jewelry.…”
There’s silence for a moment: This isn’t what she wants.
“D’you see anything of her in yourself? Are there ways in which you feel you’re like her?” she asks.
“No. Not at all,” I tell her. Too readily, too quickly.
She has a rather deliberate puzzled expression, an expression that’s asking us to help her understand.
“Richard, perhaps I could ask you what you think,” she says. “Whether you’d say there are ways in which Catriona reminds you
of her mother.”
“Well, I’ve never met her,” he says.
The present tense panics me.
Her green eyes flick across our faces.
“Perhaps you have some memories of her that you could share?” she says to me.
Images of my mother crowd my mind. Pulling on her makeup, all the glittery colored sticks, putting on her bangles and gloves
and going out for the evening and leaving me alone. Drunk, her speech slurred, weeping about her life and how it had all turned
out, dark mascara streaking her face, eating mayonnaise from the jar with a spoon. Coming to The Poplars, bringing me the
rabbits with the stitched-on satin hearts. Just give me a bit of time. Karl and me have got to get ourselves sorted.…
“She — always worked.”