Authors: Polly Samson
He shakes his head. The birds squabble, sunlight glances from the pans. She squeezes his hands. ‘Jude, I really think you should try to talk about it.’
He relieves himself of her grasp, stands and starts to pace. ‘I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t fall in love with the place once we got here,’ he says. ‘Do you remember we saw you and the boys the night we moved in?’
‘At the bonfire, yes,’ Katie says. ‘Mira wanted to play with Billy and Arthur, but you were too worried about the older children throwing fireworks.’
‘And how sad Julia was? She looked like she’d been brought to her own execution.’
They had set off from Cromwell Gardens on the morning of November the fifth and it was dark by the time they reached Firdaws. One large black cloud hung above the treetops with half a moon like a coin going into its slot. He had wanted to carry Julia over the threshold, but she laughed at him, told him he’d break his back – besides she still had Mira, dozy from the journey, in her arms.
He’d arranged for the fire to be lit and for flowers. ‘Doesn’t it look welcoming and cosy now the furniture’s all in?’ he said, and she nodded. Mira was awake now and running from room to room as he led Julia around. They came to a stop in the kitchen. She had tears in her eyes: ‘I can see why you want this so badly,’ she said. ‘I just hope you’re right and there’s a way we can make it work.’ And she buried her face in his shirt. He held her tight. ‘Thank you for letting me do this,’ he said, kissing the top of her head.
On the village green an enormous bonfire was blazing, cordite sparking expectation as they made their way towards the crowd that surrounded it. Rockets squealed and golden dandelions burst above their heads and he found himself turning to watch the bright little pansy of Mira’s upturned face beneath her woolly hat. Exploding showers lit her skin, her mouth and eyes were rounded with wonder and he found more pleasure in her face watching the fireworks than the fireworks themselves. He was lit up with the thought: This is it! Ecstatic. I am a father, what a thing!
The air crackled from the fire, making fireflies of cinders. He caught the smell of sausages. People turned from the flames with red cheeks. Beyond the bonfire the old trees and the church made reassuring silhouettes.
Mira, her cheeks and chin caramelised, grasped her first toffee apple in mittened hands. She hid herself in her pushchair’s shadowed folds from the people who said hello: toothy old faces grinning in the firelight like pumpkins. Sweetheart. Darling. Beauty.
Julia clung to his arm and buried herself in his shoulder while he ploughed Mira’s pushchair through the squelch. Children with sparklers and glowing necklaces of fluorescent tubing danced around. So many people so pleased to see Julian back where he belonged. Julia biting her lip as she turned to smile, Julian keeping up a running commentary: ‘That’s the younger Miss Hamlyn from the village shop . . . the bloke over there with the stick is Mr Horseman who owns the land next to our house, he’s aged . . . I think that’s the woman with the stables, shall I ask if there’s a pony for Mira to ride?’
Mira was leaning from her carriage towards the other children, arms outstretched. As they wheeled her round the fire he could remember his own excitement as a boy on this village green, screaming along with the fireworks, toasting sausages on sticks over the embers, writing his name with a sparkler, him and the others throwing rockets on to the pavilion roof . . .
Billy and Arthur ran by, Katie grabbing at their arms. She managed to haul them to a standstill when she spotted him. ‘Jude!’
‘Ah, Katie. I wondered if you’d be here.’ He put a hand on Julia’s shoulder to pull her to a standstill, felt awkward making the introduction and embarrassed by her glower. Katie was unconcerned as she hugged him and that’s when he noticed she’d changed back to the hyacinth scent of her teen years. It made him tender at first and then very cross.
He stops pacing, sits down and locks his hands behind his head. The phone is ringing. ‘Leave it,’ he says. Katie clears some crumbs from the table, leaning across it, scraping them with the side of her hand into a cloth.
‘When we got back here from the bonfire Julia went straight to bed,’ Julian tells her. ‘We had a furious row because I hadn’t told her about you.’
‘About
me
?’ Katie stops what’s she’s doing. ‘What about me?’
‘Oh, you know, about you being here.’ He gives her a shrug. ‘That night Mira woke up crying with a tummy ache. I think that might have been the start of it. Oh, God. We always just gave her Calpol.’
He resumes pacing, blinks back tears. He really will have to ask Katie to leave now. The phone goes on and on. ‘Shall I get that?’ she says, rising to her feet.
‘Leave it. Let it ring.’
Julian hears his mother calling his name. He’s struggling to wake, thrashing through a gap in the murk, arms tangled and fingers webbed by slime. ‘That poor dog was bursting to go outside.’ She’s shouting at him already as she comes up the stairs. He’s late for an exam, a bus, worse, he has to find Mira, weeds slip around his legs, pulling him backwards, against the beat of his arms. Mira’s face falls towards him spinning like a coin, jellyfish pulsating in her hair, he emerges into the light grasping at handfuls of air, Mira crowned with daisies. He is fully awake now, scrambling for his jeans, almost falling over them; Jenna’s in his room before he’s got his flies buttoned. She’s fanning her hand to her face, stepping over fallen clothing in her fraying Chinese slippers. Her dress is dishevelled, her greying hair needs something doing to it.
‘Mum? What are you doing here?’
‘How can you sleep with the windows shut?’ she says, rattling back the curtain as he picks a T-shirt from the floor and pulls it over his head. ‘It smells like a hamster cage in here.’
Downstairs in the kitchen a pile of Katie’s sandwiches lie uneaten on a spotted plate. He can’t remember what he did about food after she left but his stomach is growling. Michael fills the doorway from the hall, dipping his head beneath the lintel, carrying their bags from the car. A couple of confused houseflies tiptoe over the suddenly clean surfaces. His mother leans forward to smell the little jug of jasmine that Katie picked, then runs around drawing curtains and opening windows. Michael grips him in a hairy hug and he mentally thanks Katie for making him take a bath.
‘Your mum’s been frantic with worry . . .’ Michael studies Julian over the rims of his half-moons. ‘. . . You know we’ve been ringing and ringing,’ he says, glancing at the phone. Yes, it’s still there.
Jenna hands him a cup rattling on its saucer and the smell rises to his nostrils, Persian coffee with a fat cardamon pod floating on the top, something Julia had never taken to, so he’d got out of the habit.
‘In the end we decided we’d have to set off and hope you were in,’ says Jenna.
‘Long way to come if I wasn’t.’ Julian can’t help but sound petulant. He flops at the table where Michael thumps a sheaf of papers several inches thick. ‘Contracts,’ Michael says, stacking them. ‘And a couple of proposals you might find interesting.’ Julian shakes his head while his mother feeds the dog and wipes down the surfaces as if she’d never left. Next she’ll be hurrying him out of the house for the school bus. She packs the fridge with Tupperware boxes from a coolbag, chatting about the things she’s seen driving up through the village: the new houses at Beardon Hill, the burnt-out cricket pavilion.
‘I mean, what sort of person does that for kicks?’
Michael adds printouts of every unanswered email to the pile. Homework.
‘We stopped at the village shop. Miss Hamlyn-the-younger said it happened the night of the bonfire, some yob with petrol.’ His mother starts shunting the broom across the floor, at all the tiny yobs that need to be swept away, while Michael tells him of TV interest in his
Restoration Dogs
; a good production company, apparently.
‘They want you to write the script . . .’ Michael glances over his specs again: ‘I thought you might have fun with it and it’ll boost the rest of the series . . .’ and falters when he sees Julian’s face.
‘It’s got to be the best thing,’ Michael says, pulling out a chair and sitting beside him, laying a kindly paw across his. He gestures to the pile of papers. ‘You know, to keep your mind occupied.’
Julian raises his head from his hands. Jenna, determined as ever to feed him, slides glistening flesh from a mango using the side of a wine glass as a scoop, slips the slivers into a bowl.
‘Your skin is terrible,’ she says, handing him the bowl. He could tell her she didn’t look so hot herself, with her shapeless grey dress crumpled from sitting so long in the car, her legs slightly scaly above the terrible Chinese slippers that she wears to death.
‘Eat up,’ she says, pointing at the bowl. Her eye make-up has escaped into the creases around her eyes and the tip of her nose is red, one nostril glistening. In some awful way he’s glad she looks so bad. The hollow cheery chatter has been getting him down. Is it any wonder he doesn’t want to answer the phone? But when it occurs to him that she’s been crying, he has to look away. He concentrates on the shiny moons of fruit, juice pooling on the spoon, but he imagines her tears have made the mango salty and almost can’t swallow.
At the dresser he fiddles with the pottery animals: his blobby elephant, a pair of badgers.
‘You were going to make something with Mira.’
‘I remember. Hedgehogs,’ she says, perching on the edge of the table. ‘Come on, darling, eat your breakfast.’
‘After you showed her that one in the garden on Christmas Eve. Isn’t that right? She made you cross your heart?’
He replaces the badgers, reaches to the uppermost shelf and takes down two figurines, a clay man and his lady wife. ‘Lording it up,’ he says. ‘Up there above all the other animals.’ He lays them flat on the table. ‘Actually, Mum, I don’t know what to do about these.’
She looks from him to the clay figures, stands and takes him into her arms and he stifles his sobs against her bony shoulder.
‘Oh, and it was such a lovely Christmas.’ Her words knock against him, an empty bucket being drawn from a well as she pats his back.
‘It was there when we went out to search for Santa’s sleigh, it rolled into a ball when Zeph got close. She’d only seen a hedgehog in pictures before. We took it a saucer of dog food and she put a silver star from a cracker on the side, said it was his present.’ She sighs and reaches a hand to the ceramic figures, says: ‘And not at all greedy on Christmas Day. Just as excited about everybody else unwrapping their presents as her own.’ Her voice catches and she presses her fist to her mouth.
Michael steps forward. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We promised not to do this.’ He lays a hand on Julian’s shoulder, gives it a shake. ‘Let’s get out in the sunshine.’
Jenna blows her nose on Michael’s spotted handkerchief while Julian tries to conjure excuses. Zeph places his paws on his knees, cocks his head to one side, an entire orphanage of pleading in his eyes.
Julian searches for his sunglasses, Jenna fetches a rug. Even the light through the window hurts his eyes. ‘I think I’ve become agoraphobic,’ he says, sitting down again, not entirely sure he hasn’t. Michael hauls him back to his feet and outside.
Jenna looks away from the granary as they pass, reaches for Michael. Horseman has baled his hay, marking the route from the house to the river in green avenues, flanked by silent trees. The sky is an unrelenting brittle blue. Zeph bounds ahead, sniffing the air like a newly released prisoner, leaping on top of bales to bark at the swallows.
Clouds of small creatures rise around their feet from the baked grass and lanky weeds of the water meadows. Zeph sniffs something on the air and makes a run for it, spraying grass seed and scabby dock. Jenna points to the brambles in the hedge, the clenched fruit just starting to blush. ‘Blackberries look promising this year,’ she says. ‘You must remember to make jam.’
They pass half a rabbit abuzz with flies and have to drag the dog away from it.
The woods lie ahead: a single silver birch nervously quivering on its own hillock marks the entrance. Jenna points to it, tells Michael it’s the tree that always has mistletoe.
Julian had brought Julia and Mira to this tree to pick mistletoe at Christmas. They went early, wrapped up warm, their boots squelching, Mira muffled in scarves, a hat with knitted earflaps tied beneath her chin. She ran ahead looking for ruts and puddles with sparkling frozen crusts that she could crunch beneath her wellies, tunelessly singing a song about baby Jesus they’d taught her at nursery.
He led Julia by the hand; she’d lost her gloves but he kept hers warm in his. Her woolly hat was the same pale blue as her eyes, as the crisp and clear winter sky. She pulled it to cover her ears and gathered her hair, twisting it into the collar of her stockman’s coat. The tip of her nose and her cheeks were a little scorched from the cold, she had a basket in the crook of her arm, secateurs poking out of her pocket.
He hoisted Mira on to his shoulders as the silver birch came shivering into view, its whiteness making it seem more naked than any other, stark against the dark woods, a local landmark famous for witches.
Mira was playing pat-a-cake on his head. He had to twist around to talk to her. ‘See, she’s a fairytale princess of a tree.’ He swung her down so she could run and curtsy. ‘There’s her crown jewels,’ he said, pointing to its single snaggle of mistletoe, carelessly tangled and studded with pearls.