Donald sighs and sleeps. Our house creaks, settling around us for the night. If I knew the house better I would understand every sound. I’d know that each crack meant the heat dropping by a degree as the fire downstairs sank into ash. I’d know how the wind behaved as it hit the mass of the walls, and where it found its way through the window-frames. I’d know where the condensation would collect on a cool autumn morning, and where there’d be ice inside the windows in February. But I don’t know any of this. I don’t really belong here.
That’s not unusual. It’s normal these days to live in a house you don’t really understand. I knew our London house. That was where I brought the boys back, after each of them was born. I was awake every night, the way you are when you’ve given birth, bleeding into a wad of sanitary towel between the thighs, leaking milk and skimming the surface of sleep like a flat stone spun out on water. I had the babies in my arms in the green and red shawl I used for them both. I heard them mewing, and then the central heating would light in a whump of flame and I would hear the house shift and sigh as the heat began to move all through it. I knew the blackness of the windows at 2 a.m., and the hiss of tyres on the road outside, and the reassurance of the traffic that was always moving somewhere, off there. Sometimes Donald would climb out of sleep to make me tea and toast. I was hungry all the time. He would carve butter off the pat in the fridge and layer it onto my toast, then spread apricot jam, digging the whole transparent fruit out of the jam-pot for me because he knew I liked it best. He would cut the slices of toast and heap them on a plate. He would watch while I ate and the baby fed.
‘Don’t get up in the morning. Sleep as long as you can.’
We’d talk for a while then he’d fall silent, and after a while I’d realize that he was asleep. And the baby was sinking into sleep too, his tongue shivering on my nipple one last time. And I’d fall asleep suddenly, like someone walking over a cliff without even seeing the edge.
I remember the grit of dirt on the bathroom floor that I was too tired to sweep; the flakes of paint from the kitchen ceiling that fell into the saucepans when I cooked. I knew what it was like to paint that house, and sand its boards, and bump the boys’ pram backwards up the worn stone steps, one by one, the jerk of it pulling the same muscle in the middle of my back each time.
Now this house is floating on sleep. I go to the window, and stand to one side of it, and draw the curtain very slowly, an inch, then another inch, so that anyone watching from outside won’t notice that I am watching back. It’s light outside. The moon is riding high where it has sailed out of a curd of cloud. The space around it is bright and will be bright for hours now, because the wind is pushing away the last of the cloud. I look into the shadows which crowd around the walls. More shadows are heaped at the gate, by the low, bent trees and bushes. And then there are the drained fields that lead to the marsh. They are spread out under the moon, but not for clarity. The light makes them into a puzzle of themselves. I keep very still. I can see so far, as far as the rise of the sea-wall. Beyond it there’s the sea; maybe I’d guess that, even if I didn’t know. The whole landscape wears an air of possessing something beyond itself. Wind moves, and the shadows of branches poke and rummage on the ground, as if they are coming towards the house. The distant barking of a farm dog hammers at the silence.
I think I can see him. Just there by the gatepost, where the darkness is thickest. I think he is standing very still, so that the moon won’t catch him and light him as he moves. He’s standing still, and looking towards me. He doesn’t see me. He sees the house, its windows white with reflected moon. He counts them. He knows how many of us there are.
I have shut all the windows on the ground floor of the house. But maybe, without knowing it, I have left one open.
Blackmail doesn’t smash through the clean pane of a life like a stone through a window. It’s always an inside job. Somebody in the house has left that little window open, just a snick. But it’s enough. The hand reaches up, and the window creaks as cold air streams through the gap. I can see that hand when I shut my eyes before I go sleep. Sometimes it is heavy and alien, the hand of a stranger. But on other nights I feel the fingers move and I know they are my own.
NINETEEN
When you are a child there are whole days in which you believe your body could do anything. I suppose that’s one reason why people like to dwell on their childhoods. You remember what it was like to wobble your bike over the Tarmac, with your Dad’s hand under the saddle, your Dad walking and then running and then suddenly gone. Only later did you guess the moment when he let go and you shot forward out of his touch, and he slowed to watch you, head thrown back, eyes narrowed against your possible fall.
I can just about remember running down the street with my legs pumping and shoes slapping and nothing in the whole world between me and running. No scribble of thought over everything.
The sky is like pearl. This is my time, before the day begins. I don’t mind losing sleep to wake early and watch the light grow strong round the edges of the curtains.
Matt used to be ill so much when he was a baby. It always seemed to start after a day when he’d been perfect. His skin like a peeled almond, his eyes flickering with light. He would laugh. He didn’t laugh very often, and it was a reluctant, grainy sound, deep in his belly. It made my eyes sting with love. After a while I got to dread that moment when Donald and I would look at each other, wanting to say how beautiful and lovable he was, but not daring. In the middle of the night I’d jerk awake, hearing the rusty scrape in his cry, knowing already before I picked him up that he’d be burning up. Once I’d got him cooler he’d sleep close to me, and I would put my hand behind him to support him in his sleep, and feel the sharp little knuckles of his spine. The first winter was bad. He was ill all the time, and by March he looked like a baby three months younger than he really was. His pelvis showed when we washed him quickly in warm water. We didn’t bathe him, in case he lost too much strength and heat. His head looked too big, the way it had been when he was newborn. And although he’d learned to sit up, now he slumped sideways, his eyes filmed over, sunk deep in their sockets. At night he’d fold up his feet and cross them over, as if he was still in the womb, and I’d rock him while we got through the dark together, skipping the surface of sleep. I’ve never concentrated so hard on anything. My head was empty of everything but the times of his next medicine, the box of wipes, the bile he vomited, the tepid flannel to wipe him down, the water I dipped my finger into, and let him suck.
One night he began to shake. I put the light on and saw that his hands were blue. Even the nails were blue, but the rest of his skin was like wax and he was cold. I screamed out to Donald, but by the time he was properly awake Matt’s temperature had roared up again and the blue had gone. When he was getting better we’d lie together in bed in the morning, long after Donald had gone to work. The baby would be asleep, and I’d watch the ceiling and the shadows on it, as if the whole world was floating past me. I was immune. I remember a sky like pearl, and Donald bringing up some letters, and then the drift back into sleep, the baby’s temperature lower each time he woke. I didn’t get dressed. I brought toast and apples upstairs, and read case law, watching him over the heavy book as he slept and grew stronger. By four o’clock he’d woken properly, looked at me, and smiled. Immune. If someone had lifted off the front of the house it wouldn’t have touched that peace.
Donald isn’t asleep.
‘Simone,’ he says, when I begin to slither out of the bed without waking him, as I’ve done so many times.
‘Yes.’
I lean over him. I smell the morning sourness of him that I know as well as the smell of my own body. His flesh is rumpled, his eyes puffed. He blinks into a smile.
‘I’ll bring you a cup of tea,’ I say.
‘You’re going out on your own, then.’
‘You’re tired. Why not have a lie-in? The boys will watch TV.’
‘Come here.’
 
; He puts up an arm and pulls me down beside him. ‘Do you love me?’
My mouth moves stiffly. ‘Of course.’
‘What does that mean? Why don’t you say it? Why don’t you say the words?’
‘I love you.’ I say the words. They are not true as they come out of my mouth, but somewhere they are still true. Whether he knows that or not, his arm draws me closer.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for. We’re all right.’
‘I don’t like to see you –’ Suddenly he rears up on one elbow, bringing a swoosh of tired air from under the bedclothes, and takes my face between his hands. He pushes back my hair. I was naked before, but I don’t feel it until now, with my face bare to him. He scans me. ‘I can see what it’s done to you.’
‘What?’
‘You work too hard.’ He wipes his hand over my face, as if he would wipe away the morning greyness and the lines I know are there.
‘I don’t work too hard.’
He touches the corner of my mouth. ‘I wish you didn’t have to.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
My mother rises in my mind. I used to be afraid she was going to die too, from exhaustion, those years after Dad died. She was due to have a hysterectomy because of fibroids, but we didn’t know that. I remember the way she’d come back from work and peel the potatoes before she took off her coat. The buttons undone, the coat swinging as she bent to reach the potatoes out of the rack. She’d put her fists in the small of her back and lean against them, shutting her eyes. She had a beautiful, slanting, slightly Slavic face: I see that now, though I couldn’t then. I hated it when she shut her eyes. I can see her now, dragging sheets out of the twin-tub. We didn’t know why it hurt her. We ought to have helped more. She ought to have asked us to help more.
And then one day she slipped down. I thought she’d fallen over, but she hadn’t. I came in and she was jammed up between the wall and the twin-tub, her legs sticking straight out in front of her. She had her eyes shut. I was frightened because her closed eyes looked like Dad’s eyes when he died. She didn’t open them, but she stretched her mouth into a smile and said, ‘I’m all right, Simone, just a bit dizzy. Get me a cup of tea and put sugar in it. I missed lunch, that’s what’s the matter with me.’ She never took sugar.
That’s working too hard.
Donald strokes my hair back from my face with strong, steady sweeps of his hand. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘My mother.’
‘You still miss her, don’t you?’
‘Mmm.’ I haven’t cried about Mum for a long time. Once I was asleep and she came to me. Suddenly I opened my eyes and she was there, her outline clear in the darkness. She was standing, watching me. I wanted to say something but I was afraid that if I spoke she would disappear. I pushed myself up very slowly on the pillows, so I could see all of her. She was wearing a blue woollen dress, which curved softly around her hips and thighs. Even in the dark I could tell she was smiling at me. I knew how that dress would feel if I rubbed my face against it, and wrapped my arms around her body. She had that dress when I was four or five. Why could I see the colour of it so clearly, when the room was dark? Not a bright blue, but a soft colour, like sky appearing behind mist.
She stood quite still, not touching the bed, looking at me. It went on for a long time. I felt warm, although the room was cold and I had pushed myself up in bed so the covers fell back from me. I could have watched her for ever, wanting nothing more. At last she said, I’m all right, Simone. You don’t need to worry about me.’
Then after a while longer I must have looked away. Or maybe I fell asleep. But when I looked back again, at the foot of the bed, she was gone. Donald was lying in the bed beside me. It was strange to see him there, as if I’d found a husband while I was still a child. Then I did fall asleep again, and when I woke I was myself, and I had two children who were already beginning to forget their grandma.
‘You’re crying.’
I’d never told Donald about it. I didn’t think he’d believe me. He’d have believed I thought I’d seen something, but that was different. If I’d had a daughter, maybe I’d have told her, later on when she was grown up. I couldn’t tell Jenny. She’d been closer to Mum than me, that was the funny thing. It would have seemed as if I was saying, ‘I was the one she loved most. It was me she came to after she died.’
‘Don’t go yet. Lie back,’ says Donald.
He’s drawn the curtain a little so the wet grey light falls on us both. I can see pale streaks of rain running past his shoulder. I think of the house-martins’ nests, under the eaves, and water dripping onto them, softening them until they peel away and fall on the ground in clots of mud. But I know the birds build more carefully than that. They know which way the wind blows, and how the rain comes in, and they leave their dry nests to wait for them from season to season. It’s our house of stone and wood that will crumble, while they come back to their nests year after year.
I think of my mother with her hand in the small of her back, planning for the days when she would have to be in hospital because of her operation. Planning every meal we were going to eat. She left nothing to chance. I can see her so closely, her fine dark hair slipping forward over her ears, her pale skin with the groove between nose and mouth. She had a face that could look dull and worn, then suddenly so alive that she could have been any age, as young as me and Jenny. She loved it when we talked to her about things at school: the day Bridget Connolly came in wearing false eyelashes, Lucy Rydal who fainted when she got her mock O-level results, a girl called Aileen who couldn’t act but was playing Richard III through brute force of personality. But often we wouldn’t tell her things. We wanted to keep them to ourselves.
Donald knows how to touch me. Already last night and the day to come are sliding out of my mind. His breathing changes, he moves forward, shifting his weight and putting his knee between mine so my legs part. There’s a moment when I nearly turn and roll away from him. But he won’t be left. He breathes in my face, sour but familiar. I’d forgotten how soft the skin is on his shoulders, and how it makes me want to dig my hands into his flesh and see how much he can take without flinching. He didn’t flinch when the boys were born. The blood and mucus and the strange white grease on their new bodies didn’t seem to shake him at all. Later he said that it had shaken him. I’d gone so far away from him. He’d thought it would make us closer, being together while our baby was born.
‘I could have been anyone.’
Now he lifts me up and cradles me. I say nothing, and shut my eyes. In that moment I believe that he can still take it all away, and make it not happen. I want it to go on for ever, the rain and myself expanding like a dry thing thrown in water. A bit of old dry seaweed. I laugh against Donald’s shoulder.
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘I’m thinking how old I’m getting.’
He squeezes me tight. ‘You’re not old. Listen, I’m going to buy you something beautiful.’
‘Don’t say that.’ The thought of the loan crawls across my skin and I want to push him away. Make him learn what the truth is. But that smile, that innocent, lighted little smile I haven’t seen for so long.
‘I want to.’
He’s inside me now, his eyes shut again, his face blank and blind with concentration. I think of where I’m going, down by the sea, where the grey water’s always turning things over and over. I think of the way the sea falls down sheer from the edge of the Continental Shelf, miles deep. A stone would drop through it, shining at first in the light from the surface, then falling slowly through the thick darkness, past fish and whales and the shaggy monsters of the deep. I want to think of that, not of Donald.
‘You’re still crying,’ said Donald. You didn’t enjoy it.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘You should relax more, Simone.’
I sit up in the bed, pushing away the tears that were leaking down the side of
my face.
‘Why didn’t I think of that,’ I say.
‘I wish you’d tell me –’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No,’ I say, kneeling up, my face six inches from his. I know that he’s afraid to ask the questions he should ask, and a scorch of anger calms me. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
He doesn’t want to know anything. He is safe in his own world, and he’s taking care not to know anything that would take him out of it. Let me do whatever has to be done. And yet he expects me to lose myself in fucking. How can I let myself go when he could take his hands away from under me at the last minute? But he can’t help it. It’s his nature. He does know: somewhere in himself he knows everything. Every phone call, every letter. He’s holding his breath, too, waiting to know what’s going to happen.
‘You know who I hated, for years and years?’ I asked him. ‘My father. Because he just fucked off and left us.’
‘He died, Simone.’
‘He shouldn’t have died. He needn’t have died. I can remember it now. Jenny and I were drawing. We had these Lakeland pencils; they were mine really, and we were quarrelling over them. They were spread out all over the floor. I was lying on my stomach, and I looked up where he was standing, with one hand on the mantelpiece and his body bent sideways where it was hurting him. My mother was begging him to ring for the doctor, but he wouldn’t. He made himself straighten up, then he took three aspirin and went to bed. My mother sat by the fire with us and looked at Jenny’s homework, but she kept going in to see how he was. Every time she went out of the room the draught ran over my back. And by the morning it wasn’t hurting so much. He just couldn’t wake up properly.’
‘It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know how serious it was.’