‘Your hair,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t wear it like that. It’s not a good look for men who are getting thin on top. It looks as if you’re trying to hide something. Much better to cut the whole lot short, don’t you think?’
His hand flies up to the richly groomed wave of dark-brown hair that dips over his forehead. He snatches the hand back.
‘No, that bit’s fine,’ she says. ‘It’s higher up, where you can’t see it. That’s where the problem is.’
And she walks to the door, opens it, nods her head at him as if they are old friends, then departs.
Four
You depart. You come down the white stone steps, and find that you are holding the handrail, and standing still. It’s a beautiful day. Big clouds scud high above the houses, and a breeze blows fabric against flesh as people hurry down the street. You watch the outlines of them, the swell of thighs and breasts.
You are glad you said it. You know that he hated you and wanted to hurt you, and you feel your own rancour pinning you there on the steps, away from the flowing street. You’d have liked to watch him slump and die in front of you. But the breeze blows harder, becoming a warm wind, and suddenly you are out in it, walking southward. You don’t care. No one is going to stick knives and tubes into your body, or hoover out the fat from under your skin. You must have been mad to go there. Imagine if it was Anna; imagine living to see your daughter so desperate she would let a man with a knife go at her in the hope of relief. There are plenty of things that we’d call crimes, you think, walking into the ripple of wind, if we hadn’t made them seem normal.
You wanted the surgeon to wipe everything away, and let you go back to where you were. He couldn’t do that. You wanted to be back to that winter’s night nine months before Anna was born, at the table with Paul and Johnnie, both of them looking at you, you smiling, the light falling on to the white cloth and your faces. At the party, before the clients arrived, when everything was perfect. Flowers, knives, tablecloths, fresh, bright, unstained. Your black silk dress that fitted so perfectly over thighs and buttocks and breasts. Paul looking at you and thinking of how he would touch you later. You looking back, charged with Paul and with the thought of Johnnie which you held to yourself and never acted upon. There they both were, and you held them, you possessed them both and you loved them as you’d never loved them before and never would again. You could smell perfume rising, warm and dry, from between your breasts. You shifted position so that the silk moved over your skin and you almost shivered. You saw Johnnie’s eyes change, as if he felt it too.
Your mother told you your breasts were beautiful. She touched your waist where it was narrowing between the swell of your breasts and your hips. She said your figure was perfect, and took you to be measured for hand-made bras, then for coffee and cakes afterwards, in celebration. She drank Turkish coffee, and at home she had little copper cups with long handles, and a copper coffee-maker. The coffee was dark and thick as syrup and it made your heart bump beneath your new breasts.
Your mother never went back to Romania, although she had uncles there, and there are second cousins you’ve never seen. Her parents were dead. You don’t think of them as your grandparents; they belong to your mother, like treasure she had hidden and now could not find. Your mother had no sisters or brothers. She was sad that you, too, were going to be an only child, but you didn’t care. You had a bedroom of your own, unlike any of your friends.
Your mother told you about coming to England. She came by train from Bucharest, across Hungary and Germany. The trains burned soft brown coal, and her skin and hair drank in the smoke. She smelled of train-dirt until she came to England and washed herself over and over with a slab of green soap which she did not yet know was for washing floors, not people. She took her first job in the Queen Alexandra Hotel near Regent’s Park, and she lived in. She worked in the laundry, where she sorted and darned Irish linen table-cloths and napkins.
People didn’t mind a darn then, it was quite normal. In fact, darning was an art, in those years after the war, and your mother possessed it. At night she went to English classes, then back she came up the endless stairs, to a room which did not need curtains because it was so high.
Your mother’s eyes were like black velvet curtains. They took in everything, and rarely gave it back. She married an Englishman she thought would prove as clean and strong as the linen, and he didn’t fail her. They were old when they had you, your mother touching forty, your father two years older. The one thing he could not abide was organized religion, and on Sundays you walked, the three of you. You took the tube to Kew Gardens, or Hampstead Heath, or you walked through central London from park to park in the bloom of Sunday quiet long before the shopping laws changed.
Your mother told you that you were baptized. She had had it done somehow, quietly, so as not to impinge upon your father. When you had to fill in forms at school you had to write Russian Orthodox, which was hard work compared to C. of E. or R. C. Sometimes she took you to the Orthodox church. She answered in English when people spoke to her in Russian or in Romanian. You took it all in like breathing.
One day your mother told you it was Easter. You knew it wasn’t, because you’d had your Easter eggs two weeks before. She reminded you that the Orthodox Easter came according to a different calendar, and even though she spoke to you in English, as always, it was clear which calendar was right, and that it was the true Easter which you were about to observe. The Gregorian Calendar, she told you, as if she was giving you sweets after promising herself not to.
You don’t think that it was Easter Day itself. It was Passion Sunday, perhaps. Certainly it was a Sunday. You remember thin, bright sunshine, and the peaceful echoes of your feet on empty pavements.
Your mother held your hand. Her right sleeve brushed your face. You were seven or perhaps eight, and small for your age. You didn’t know that you were about to start growing, and nor did your mother, who worried because you were the smallest in your class. Soon it was all going to be the past. Do you remember when Louise wouldn’t grow? How we used to worry about her? She gave you Virol and Cod Liver Oil, and bought orange juice with a blue foil top from the milkman for your breakfast. No one else drank it, only you, because it was expensive. After she gave you the Virol you held it in your mouth for as long as you could without gagging, then spat it down the toilet. At school you refused to eat foods if they touched one another, or were connected in any way by gravy or custard. Your teacher stopped your mother in the street and said, ‘I don’t know why you waste your money on school dinners for Louise, Mrs Hapgood. She never eats them.’ Your mother was angry, but with the teacher, not with you.
‘It’s not her business what happens to the dinners. They are paid for.’
The entrance to the church was black with old women. You doubted if there’d be space to squeeze through. But your mother saw no problem, and you went through in her wake, through waves of flesh. Your mother stopped, and put money into a box, then went into the little church.
The men stood on the right, the women on the left. You stood beside your mother, so close that you were touching, but her face looked out and away from you, towards the iconostasis. People were going forward, bowing to kiss the icons. You didn’t know what was going on. You hadn’t been to church often enough to make sense of it, or to predict what would come next.
‘Why are all these people here?’ you asked, as your mother made room for you. You had never seen the church so packed.
‘They are here to remember the sufferings of Christ,’ whispered your mother, and her little ironic smile twisted her lips. She began to join in the prayers everybody around you was murmuring, even though you didn’t know or understand the words, and you hadn’t known that she knew and understood them. Your mother crossed herself and you crossed yourself too, looking ahead as she did, at the iconostasis behind which lights moved and people moved, intent as builders. You didn’t know what they were making in there. You wanted to see, but at the same time you were ha
ppy to be where you were, not seeing. You knew that later on the priest would emerge, and that he would move about in front of the people, wrapped up in his tasks.
The old woman on your other side was so shrunk and bent that you were nearly as tall as her, even though you were only eight — or perhaps seven - and small for your age. She was finding it hard to stand. She could have gone to sit at the side of the church, in one of the tall seats that faced into its body, but though another old woman gestured to her and indicated a place, she wouldn’t go. She stayed beside you, her elbow touching your elbow, her body swaying as she listened to the cantor. Sometimes she groaned quietly, and she sang the responses in a queer rough voice, like a man’s voice, as she crossed herself over and over again.
You saw her begin to struggle and you thought she was falling over, so you pulled your mother’s arm. But your mother simply glanced at you, and frowned, and looked forward again, where the priest was moving behind the iconostasis. Slowly and clumsily, the old woman clambered to her knees. You watched every movement as she shuffled her body forward and down. The lumpiness of her, with her bum thrust up in its black worn coat. Stiffly and oldly, she sank until her face touched the ground. Her back went flat so you could have put your foot on it and stood on her. And then, on your left hand, your mother went down too, past your elbow, shrinking to her knees and then to her face on the floor. The cantor sang in his raw, rich voice that made your eyes sting. In front of the icons candle flames dipped, then sprang tall, and the black eyes of God’s Holy Mother watched you. There was your mother, on the ground with the old women, and here were you left standing, the tallest thing of all, like a house in a knocked-down street. There wasn’t space for you even to kneel. If you moved you couldn’t walk, you’d be wading through flesh.
Your mother got up easily, in one springing movement, and was tall at your side again. The old women scrambled and heaved. You heard them groan to themselves beneath the sound of chanting: Euch, euch, as if their bones hurt. There was a smell, and you knew someone nearby had farted with the effort.
For a strange moment your mother folded her arms and stared straight ahead, through the gap in the iconostasis, as if she was arguing with someone there. The chanting rose round you, black and silver like the icons. Your head ached, you swayed against your mother’s blue jacket, and the cloth rubbed your cheek. Your mother glanced at you, then she opened her handbag and took out a piece of paper and a little betting-shop pencil. She drew a line down the paper, dividing the left from the right. She began to write two columns of names, one on the right, the other on the left of the paper. She wrote as if she was writing a shopping list for the things she bought every week, rapidly, and without hesitation.
‘What are you doing?’ you whispered.
‘I’m having prayers said for them.’ She pointed at the names. Her father’s name, her mother’s name. More names, but people you didn’t know. On the right side, your name, and your father’s name. ‘The names of the dead are on the left,’ she told you. You put out your finger and touched the names. Now you knew they were the names of the dead, who needed prayers more than the living. Even your prayers, though you’d never met them. Your mother asked you, as if you were grown-up like her, and not her own child, ‘Do you want to put a name here?’ You said yes. You wanted to put her name, your mother’s, and your father’s, side by side, but you didn’t want to tell her in case she guessed you were afraid she might the. She gave the pencil to you, the little, plain, wood-coloured pencil your father must have brought home from the bookies’. ‘You can write it yourself,’ she said. You bent over and leaned the paper on your knee, and then you wrote both their names, on the right-hand side. Daniela Maria Hapgood. Arthur George Hapgood.
Your mother took back the paper without reading it. ‘Wait here,’ she said, and went forward with the paper and her purse, to the doorway in the iconostasis behind which the priest was at work. You saw her hand the paper to someone, and take money from her purse and give that too. People had closed in around you, taking away the space where your mother had been. You were afraid she would never be able to find you again, and you didn’t dare call out to her. But she slipped through the mass of people easily, and smiled at you, and took up her place beside you again. She bowed her head, and crossed herself once, twice, three times. Her lips moved and you knew she was speaking in her other language, the one you didn’t understand.
You stayed so long you thought your mother had forgotten what she’d told you on the way to church. We won’t stay for the whole service. It’s too long for you. You didn’t mind. You were beyond being tired, or bored. You were sunk deep in the river of chanting as it washed through the church, through your skin and into the spaces behind your eyes. You knew it was like water, at one moment a trickle in your hands, at the next grown to vastness. You thought of the brown surge of water under the bridges of the Thames. Your mother was there, close to you, her body pressed against yours as the chant swelled and the candles guttered by the silver frames of the icons.
You came out blinking into daylight. It felt as if a whole night had passed in the church, and you were sure you’d been asleep, propped up and standing. You clung to your mother as she talked to people you didn’t know she knew. Hands touched your hair, and you burrowed closer into your mother’s side, wanting her to take you away.
She was wearing her best black suede shoes, but now there was a mark on them, where someone had stood on her toe. You watched her feet and knew she wanted to escape, too, but was standing still out of politeness. At last you were released and trotting beside her as her heels clopped on the pavement. The sun was on you both and your mother was smiling.
‘Oh, that church!’ she said. ‘It’s always so crowded, it gives me a headache. But soon the old people will start dying and then it won’t be crowded any more.’
You looked secretly at your mother, who was forty-seven.
‘How old are they, those old people?’ you asked cunningly.
‘Oh, they’re old,’ said your mother. Then she said, ‘When I was a little girl I used to go to my grandparents in the country every summer. There was a little wooden church there which had been rolled over the mountains.’
‘How can you roll a church?’
‘I don’t know, but I remember my grandfather telling me how all the men of the village had rolled the church over the mountains. He said, If ever we need to, we can roll it away again, to a safe place.’
You walked at your mother’s side. You saw the church, packed with women in black, and the men under it, rolling it over the snowy tops of the mountains while the cantor sang, the priest blessed the people, and the old women groaned under their breath: Euch, euch.
‘There was a wonder-working icon, too,’ your mother added. ‘People said the church could never be destroyed as long as the icon remained in it.’
‘So the church is still there?’
‘No, actually, I think it burnt down,’ said your mother absently. ‘We had a lot of fires, with all the wooden buildings. My grandfather’s house burned once, and my grandmother tried to put out the flames with a soup-ladle.’
‘With a ladle?’
‘Yes.’ Suddenly your mother came back to herself. Her voice changed to her daily voice. ‘It’s a long time ago, Louise, it doesn’t matter. It’s all finished.’
You are still walking along the sunny street. Your mother has been dead for twelve years, your father for fourteen. They never saw Anna. It was finished as far as they knew: one child, no grandchildren. They don’t know what you have done. You walk in the ripple of wind and think of them: Daniela Maria Hapgood, Arthur George Hapgood. You think of your father in the tiny greenhouse he built for himself, weighing a bunch of black grapes in his hand. He showed you the bloom on them, and warned you not to touch it. The grapes were not quite ripe. When they were ripe he’d let you cut the bunch with your mother’s scissors. He is a big, fair man, as clean and strong as linen. He can’t understand the shadows ins
ide you, so you put them away and make them invisible. He can’t bear organized religion. When you go on a school trip to the Tower of London, he tells you that the National Health Service is worth a thousand times more than the Crown Jewels. If you break your leg, is the Queen going to mend it for you? He knows how to set a plant in the soil so it feels at home there. You’re his little girl.
He’ll be forgotten; both of them will be forgotten. Only you remember them now, in the way people need to be remembered. Their goodness has run away like water. Everything they touched has disappeared: the greenhouse is broken, the grapes eaten. The church has rolled away again, over the mountains. Only you are left here, in the muddle you’ve made, your child separated from you, your flat strewn with sticky bottles which you’re always meaning to put out for recycling. But you never do.
You stand on the shore, staring after the ship your parents have sailed on, but your toes sink into mud and there’s a stench of sewage in the water. Their ship catches the departing light, but already they’ve gone below deck and they’re considering the menu, seriously as they always do, because food is important and not to be taken for granted. They don’t know that you’re still watching. They don’t know that you’re walking along this sunny street after your trip to the plastic surgeon. Your mother thought you were beautiful as you were.
Five
You are with Anna, in the garden. It’s a late November day, and Anna’s wearing red woolly tights, a short navy skirt, a navy hooded fleece. You are wearing jeans and a cable-stitch sweater: Mum clothes. You want everything to be normal.
‘I’ve been looking through your toys,’ you say. ‘Later on we’ll sort out what you want to take to Dad’s, and what you want to keep here. There might be some stuff you don’t want any more, now you’re a big girl.’
Anna stares at you. Her face is shrunken inside the blue hood. ‘I want to keep everything,’ she says.