Spiderweb

  ‘Hang your hat on a pension,’ said Stella. ‘Incidentally he doesn’t fancy me at all. I don’t think he even likes me.’

  Nadine giggled. She was heady with relief and excitement. There was going to be a proper wedding – no cut-price registry office do – and a two-bedroom flat in Fulham.

  ‘You next,’ she said benevolently.

  By then they were twenty-three. Getting on in years, almost over the hill. If you were going to have children, said Nadine, you had to do it well before you were thirty, or you got incredibly fat and your insides went to pot entirely. She should make it nicely – two babies at least. By that time the Fulham flat would have been traded in for a house in Richmond, or maybe out in the country. But she was worried about Stella. After a further couple of years the benevolent concern turned to serious anxiety.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Apart from anything else, being married means sex whenever you like and not being scared all the time about getting pregnant.’ Nadine was by now extremely pregnant. ‘All those years counting the calendar … I’ve forgotten what it was like.’

  Contrary to popular belief, the young of the fifties had as vibrant a sex life as those of the nineties. They simply made less fuss about it. Stella and Nadine had both had some anxious moments with the calendar.

  ‘I’ll have to take my chance,’ said Stella. It was not clear if she referred to her prospects of getting pregnant inadvertently or the effect on her figure and her insides of doing so too late.

  Nadine gave her a cautionary look. The word spinster was still around back then – at its last gasp, admittedly. It hung between them, unspoken.

  ‘Maybe I’ll remain single,’ said Stella, ahead of her time semantically and perhaps in other ways.

  ‘What about sex?’

  ‘I don’t see that as a great problem.’ Again, it was not quite clear what Stella meant.

  ‘Men go for you,’ said Nadine sternly, as though this created some sort of obligation.

  ‘Oh, I rather go for them, too.’

  Nadine sighed, rolled her eyes equivocally and folded her hands on her swelling stomach. She wore a voluminous pinafore dress. In Stella’s opinion, marriage had flung her friend into a premature matronhood that seemed like some smug assumption of the veil. Nadine, on the other hand, saw Stella as perversely embracing a future of promiscuity and ultimate solitude. This disparity of vision was to prompt a gradual distancing between the two of them. Monthly meetings would give way to an occasional exchange of letters and eventually to the ritual Christmas card.

  ‘How is Richard?’ said Stella, moving on to safer ground.

  Richard, today, was a mere fifteen miles away and was perhaps also briefly deflected to other times by his phone conversation with Stella. It had been a slightly stilted conversation. Stella had been conscious that she was in his debt on account of the information about the cottage and should make some definite social overture. Richard had rung to ask if her removal had gone smoothly. He had seemed to scrape around determinedly for things to say. A rather stiff man, she remembered, always apparently on his best behaviour, perhaps because he knew of no other kind. In the end she had invited him over for lunch in a couple of days’ time.

  She had forgotten that Richard was living in the West Country until his Christmas card had arrived, bleak with its solitary name in a neat, constricted hand. She remembered Nadine’s flowing scrawl. And noticed, too, the postmark. She was favouring that area herself as a place in which to settle. The card and the postmark had tipped the balance. She wrote to Richard asking him to look at estate agents’ advertisements for her.

  ‘I hope the new home is up to expectations,’ Richard had said just now, and for an instant she hadn’t understood what on earth he was on about. Whose home? Ah – her home, of course. This was what she now had, apparently. And must set to and play the part. Nest. Embellish. Fix rogue radiators, fit washers to taps.

  She had lived, time was, in a house made of dried mud, in a straw hut, in various tents. In bed-sitters and flats over corner shops or at the top of high-rise buildings or slotted into nineteenth-century mansions. In a stone croft on an island and in a room over the coffee shop in a Greek mountain village. She had not perceived these places as homes, though each had in its way become important to her. She could still revisit them, in her head, could tour the fittings and fixtures. Her bed in the mud house had a thick woven red cover with a zig-zag pattern in black. On the wall of the flat above a greengrocer’s shop in Liverpool there hung a reproduction Degas of ballet dancers. The yellow oilcloth on the kitchen table of the stone croft was rubbed and cracked with age. These objects operated as a personal mnemonic system, but a random one. No logical progression ran from one to another: they were simply there, in full colour and with precise detail, serving as hitching posts and as prompts.

  A social anthropologist lives over the shop, in a professional sense as well as sometimes in a literal one. Field-work is not an occupation conducive to family life, as Stella had had occasion to note. Marriages tended to break up when couples were confronted with the raw choice of extended separation or intense proximity under taxing conditions. In her trade, you travelled most fruitfully if you travelled alone. And it helped it you were footloose and singularly unfettered by personal possessions.

  But now she owned a house. This house, this home. An entanglement that was causing her some unease as she confronted the implications. This is where she would now live, not just for weeks or months but for the foreseeable future. For years.

  Her last job had been at a Midlands university. And where are you going to live? her colleagues had asked, as the final months ticked away, the countdown to the end of the summer term that would mark also this eerie shift from employment to statutory leisure. At first she had ignored the question. Then she had contemplated the prospect of continuing to live in the inner-city flat with nothing to recommend it but its convenient closeness to her department. Then she started looking at the atlas.

  Thus, the cottage. She had seen at once that it would do, that, as Richard Faraday said, it met all her stipulated requirements. She couldn’t be bothered to trawl estate agents in case something marginally better lay around the corner. She bought it.

  And now she felt no proprietorial surge, no glow of ownership. She would have to get more furniture, to build bookshelves. Of more immediate importance, she needed to discover this place, to do the sort of things she had always done in new surroundings. Move about, observe, listen. Without notebook or tape recorder but simply for her own interest, because she could no longer imagine any other way of living. The world is out there, richly stocked and inviting observation.

  She was sixty-five, apparently. This totemic number had landed her here. Having spent much time noting and interpreting complex rites of passage in alien societies, she now found herself subject to one of the implacable rules of her own: stop working, get old.

  In other societies the likes of her would be variously seen as valuable repositories of knowledge, as objects of pity and respect, or as economic encumbrances ripe for disposal. Exempt from such extremes, she could define her own position. She could be as she wished, do as she liked.

  She had plans. There were articles that she intended to write, for the journals of her trade. She would keep her hand in professionally. But she would branch out, also. Read with luxurious eclecticism, pander to ignorance, learn about things of which she knew nothing.

  And I will get a dog, she thought suddenly. I have always liked animals and there has never been an opportunity. A dog is appropriate, in a place like this, it would serve as a credential. I live here now – this is the end of the line, the last stop.

  The prospect began to be interesting. She turned from the window and looked around her: at her own possessions which invited arrangement – books to be unpacked, pictures to be hung – at the fireplace for which she must find logs, the windows that needed curtains.

  Stella turned from the window and went to the
telephone, to rally plumbers and carpenters.

  It was just as they’d known it would be. She came back from Carter’s so pleased with herself that she’d been in a good mood for the rest of the day. She’d given Carter what for and told him he could get stuffed, she’d take her business elsewhere. She was all wound up, buzzing, like an engine running at full throttle. It was always like that, when she’d had a row. And if it was a row with outsiders, then it meant she’d let up back at home. She’d be all smiles. You could relax.

  She did bangers and chips for supper and got ice-cream out of the freezer. Even Gran got the treatment – jokes and teasing till she dropped that stupid hangdog look she usually had and grinned and cackled a bit.

  Later, their father cashed in and went out to the pub. He didn’t often do that. Partly because she got ratty if he did, and partly because he wasn’t that bothered anyway. He hadn’t got any time for people, so he wouldn’t talk to anyone, but he liked a beer.

  She put the television news on – she wanted to get the weather forecast. On the screen there were people running, women dragging children, and then the noise of gunfire. The picture changed and you saw bodies lying in front of a shop. The boys looked at this bit with interest. Michael peered at the screen. You could see an ad outside the shop for Coke, just like you’d see outside the shop in the village, but the writing on another ad was in a foreign language and the shop had a funny name.

  ‘See that?’ he said. ‘I dunno where that is but they have Coke, just the same as here.’

  Their mother glanced at the screen. There was a dead person now, flies crawling on his face. ‘Of course they do, stupid. Some things you get everywhere, all over the world.’

  Michael thought about this. He wasn’t really very interested, but her being in a good mood had made him feel like talking. But now do you know that? You haven’t ever been anywhere. Anywhere outside England.’

  She snapped the television off. She stood in front of him, her hands on her hips. ‘Say that again.’

  He’d blown it. He felt the familiar cold trickle in his insides. He knew that Peter had gone tense. ‘I just said …’ he began.

  ‘You don’t know anything, do you? You don’t know anything about what I’ve done and where I’ve been, do you?’

  He picked up the North Somerset Herald and pretended to be reading about the Young Farmers’ Rally.

  She walloped the newspaper so that the sheets flew out of his hands. ‘I’m talking to you, Michael. I said what do you know about what I’ve done and where I’ve been? And you can wipe that look off your face, Peter. Is something funny?’

  They stared at her. This moment melted into all the other times she’d exploded like this, like a crack of thunder, throwing you off your balance so all you could do was stare and wait for it to finish. She’d done that when they were two and three, and four and five. She’d done that before they could remember. It was the first thing they did remember – her face close to theirs, shouting.

  ‘I’ve been to plenty of places you’ve never even heard of. I’ve been all over America.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know that, did I?’ Michael mumbled. ‘You never told us.’

  ‘I don’t tell you everything, do I? I’ve driven all over America in a Cadillac car. Before you lot were born. Before I was saddled with you. I was six months on a ranch in California.’

  ‘Well, they’d have Coke there, I suppose,’ he muttered, too quiet for her to hear.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. Just shut up. She walked out into the kitchen.

  They were both of them as big as she was now, but it never felt like that. When she turned on them they were still half her size; she reared above them and their stomachs ran cold. They stiffened in expectation of the clout that might come, the whiplash of her hand. She didn’t clout them now, not any more, not for a long time, but the feel of it was still there, the anticipation, the shock when it came.

  Once, they had had a Staffordshire bull terrier pup. Their mother had made a low plank fence to stop the pup getting into the yard where the rabbit pens were. When the pup got big it could have jumped over that fence easily, but it never did, because it thought it couldn’t. They were like that dog.

  Sometimes they knew that but couldn’t say so, except in a certain way to each other. ‘This is her, right?’ they’d say, when they were knocking in a nail or chopping a log. ‘This is one for her …’ Wham! Smash!

  After she’d gone out of the room they didn’t even look at each other. Presently Peter turned the television on again. It was the weather forecast and she’d missed it.

  When the television news was over Stella switched off and sat staring at the blank screen for a moment, chilled by what she had seen. She had been to a conference once in a city near the place in which these things were happening, had driven through that landscape, observed and talked to people doing daily, ordinary things – filling cars with petrol and selling fruit and vegetables and serving coffee. Taking children to school. Dead now, some of them, with flies on their faces. She got up and delved for an atlas in the as yet unpacked boxes of books. She round the place that had been on the news. Names that she recognized sprang at her from the map. We went there, she thought, and there and there. Once I stood looking at wall-paintings in a church just there – or at least the person I then was did so. And now I am here, and some of those people are not anywhere at all. Possibly, back then, I walked past those very people so horribly seen just now.

  She turned to the British Isles section. The west of England. There am I, she thought, just there alongside the thread of that road, at the foot of that brown range of high ground. And there is the pub where Dan and I stayed long ago.

  When Stella contemplated her own progress through time and space, she saw lines – black lines that zig-zagged this way and that, netting the map of England, netting the globe, an arbitrary progress hither and thither. And sometimes these lines crossed one another. The intersections must surely be points of significance – these places to which she had been twice, three times, many times, but as different incarnations of herself, different Stellas ignorant of the significance of this site – that she would revisitit as someone else. But this progress of hers took place on two different planes. The web was not flat but of three or indeed four dimensions – it had to incorporate both time and space in the way that only physicists can imagine. Stella thought of those spiderwebs that form an airy complex density of minutely connected strands. Her space–time progress was something like that, the whole thing shimmering with these portentous nodes at which the future lay hidden. You walk blindly past the self that is to come, and cannot see her.

  So, Stella, now. Standing in an unfamiliar house, an atlas in her hands – a tall spare woman, dressed in trousers and a sagging sweater, her hair a gingery profusion spiked with grey, perfunctorily twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck and skewed with a plastic clip. Narrow feet, long limbs, thin, elegant fingers that turn the pages of the book. Her face is thin, too – long pointed nose, wide mouth, blue eyes with a fold of skin dipping down now above and a web of wrinkles below. Never a conventionally beautiful face, you would decide, but arresting. You might glance, then look again.

  Chapter Three

  Michael said, ‘Did she go to America before we were born? Was she on a ranch in California?’

  Ted Hiscox swung his head round from the innards of a tractor. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Their father dived into the engine again. ‘Maybe she did. If that’s what she says. Get me a can of oil.’

  They had not always lived here at the bungalow. The boys knew that because both carried in their heads murky images of an elsewhere, a number of elsewheres. They did not compare these images, perhaps because it did not occur to them and also because it was as though that time had never been. There was a door slammed shut. ‘What d’you mean?’ she’d say. ‘Where were we before we came here? We were somewhere else, weren’t we, stupid? What’s i
t got to do with you, anyway?’ Their father was much the same. ‘I dunno when we came here. Ten years ago, something like that. What’s it matter?’

  These patchy visions of other places were in any case dominated always by her presence. They were just the blurred background to her hectic action. She was having a row with their father, or bawling them out for something they’d done. Sometimes there were other people involved. Once she had had a dust-up with a man in a car-park who’d taken the space she wanted and when he’d gone she got a screwdriver and scraped lines on the man’s car. Then she’d let them have a go at doing that and it had been brilliant. They’d done it since, several times, and both knew that the other remembered.

  They both carried, too, the time she banged their heads together and then left them crying on a dusty pathway somewhere. Her hands grabbing them and the raging pain in the skull and each other’s red ravaged face and her not there any more, just the dusty empty path.

  So they had not always been here in Somerset. This fact did not particularly interest them, but they considered it from time to time. And every now and then, she would go on about things she’d done or things she knew about. Like the ranch in California. But then if you talked of that again, she’d lash out, like as not, and say you were talking nonsense. They’d start wondering then if she’d said it or she hadn’t. She could get them so they weren’t certain any more if she’d said something or if they’d imagined her saying it, like they were confused sometimes between things she’d done and things they knew she might do, was capable of doing.

  You never knew where you were with her. She flew from mood to mood. And in good moods she said things that no longer held at other times. Or else she’d never said it. Like the business about agricultural college, last week. Michael had asked her about it.