Two

As we finished our conversation another bus drove up and this time I got on. I rode through the city, gazing at the festive streets. From the hive of electric lights, the energy-wasting, global warming-schwarming two-fingered gesture to the mood of our time that was Harrods, through the grand baubles of Regent Street to the scrappy strings of traffic-light coloured bulbs nearer home, London, like a good old girl, was making an effort.

The day, when it began, had given me no warning that it was going to turn out to be any different from any other Tuesday. I am not a morning person. My natural inclination, when faced with the choice of catching a worm or staying in my warm bed, is to leave the worm for a more deserving, perkier bird. It had been no different this morning when it had taken three alarms sounding in sequence as well as the mantra that never failed to put a spring in my step, ‘Get out of bed, you useless lump, and be grateful you’re not dead’, to get me up.

I had opened the curtains, that were yellow with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in the dragon-reds and blues and greens of Fairyland Lustre Ware, and looked out on to my street. All had been as it usually was: the bags of rubbish drawn to the lamp-post at the corner like party-goers to the most glittering guest, the graffiti taking the place of Christmas wreaths on the row of doors opposite and the large dog of undetermined parentage taking his morning dump in the middle of the pavement while his owner, a fat middle-aged man dressed like a rocker, looked the other way. As usual I had toyed with the idea of sticking my head out of the window and, if not actually yelling abuse, at least asking him, politely, if he would mind clearing up after his pet. As always I decided not to as I didn’t want him posting the turd through my letterbox. After my shower I had eaten my usual breakfast of Cheerios with a sliced banana and a large mug of sweet milky tea while I glanced through the paper. It was Tuesday so my day to walk Mrs Milford’s dachshund, Jonah. I didn’t like Mrs Milford or Jonah, but somehow it had been my idea to set up a rota amongst neighbours willing to walk the damn dog after MRSA following a hip operation had landed Mrs Milford in a wheelchair.

Jonah had, as usual, bitten me as I tried to put his harness on. Jonah was a small dog so his bites, leaving two punctures and a slight swelling, were more like the bites of a mildly venomous snake, but I had been careful to keep up my tetanus shots all the same. I had asked another neighbour on the rota how long a miniature dachshund might be expected to live – Jonah was seven – and she had told me up to seventeen years.

By eight o’clock I had delivered Jonah back home to Mrs Milford and by eight fifteen I was on the bus. At eight fifty-five I had walked through the staff entrance of the museum. I had made my way up the stairs and along the corridors to the ceramic restoration studio, feeling the modest thrill I always felt as I went about my business behind the scenes, as if moving around the intricate works of a beautiful old clock. Diana, one of the other restorers, and I were about to start work on a rare William de Morgan panel. The panel was an exciting find. It had not been thought that any of the panels de Morgan designed for the P&O liners had survived until this was discovered in an architectural salvage yard in Somerset.

I had told my mother all about it a day or so ago. I had sensed I was losing my audience; it might have been the tapping of fingernails against the receiver or possibly the fact that she was simultaneously keeping up a conversation with my stepfather: ‘In the drawer. I said in the drawer. No, not that one. The one to the left. Well, right then. Don’t be so pedantic.’

I wound up my story of the tiles and my mother had suggested that I go and buy myself something nice to wear. She might not share my enthusiasm for porcelain but she did place great importance on appearance and she seemed to sense the gaps in my wardrobe even from the other side of the world in Australia.

Diana and I had spent most of the day bent over the boxes, unwrapping the jewel-coloured tiles and fragments and placing them on the worktable, where they were left like broken promises. It had seemed no time at all had passed when darkness settled once more and the end of the day had been reached. By six o’clock I was making my way back down the corridors of the museum and on to the street.

So, I thought as I rode home on the bus, it had been a day much like any other, a day giving me no clue that at its end I would be feeling like a glove puppet wrenched inside out, left to gaze uncomfortably at what was hidden inside.

I reached my stop. The sleet had turned to rain and I hurried towards home, clip clop clip clop, in step with all the other drones, heads down, not looking left nor right, expressions blank when eyes accidentally met eyes, wanting only to reach the scents and warmth of home. I expected those others were thinking about what to cook for supper; thinking longingly of kicking off sodden shoes and swapping their uptight work clothes for something soft and loose and smelling of Lenor; looking forward perhaps to something nice on the television. At least, that was how my own thoughts went most winter evenings as I made my way those last few yards to home. But not this evening. Tonight it felt as if my mind were under attack from a swarm of killer bees each carrying its own deadly sting: a laughing girl, a moonlit lake, a cry for help, an angry grieving father, a careless friend who should have known better.

I sang quietly to myself as I marched in step: ‘Oh death where is your stingeling-a-ling your stingeling-aling your stingelingaling,’ a smile fixed on my lips. Smiles however forced, they had told me at the clinic, brought smiley feelings with them. Just not tonight. I tried another trick: reciting facts, lovely, sure-footed, neutral facts, unchanging unchangeable facts, facts beyond my control. The Loire, France’s longest river. Lisbon, located at the mouth of the River Tejos. The Mediterranean, connected to the Atlantic by the Sound of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. Rhymes were good too, simple, repetitive, constant: Jack and Jill went up the hill . . . Ding dong dell . . . Humpty Dumpty . . . no, not that. Humpty Dumpty was nothing but an ode to defeatism. The very antithesis of what a restorer stood for. I would have put him together again. It was what I did.

I reached my front door. My flat was above a bridal shop. It was not a very good shop. Sometimes I would stand at the window looking at the young women arriving with their mothers and sisters and friends, all smiles and excited chatter. Then, some little time later they would come out looking a little bewildered, a little less glossy, as if the lacklustre pick of frocks and veils supplied by the shop had given them a foretaste of the compromises that lay ahead. But the shop was shut for the day and there was no one around now as I let myself in. I had my own front door and a tiny hallway with stairs leading up to the actual flat, that consisted of a bedroom and bathroom, a sitting room and a kitchen.

Once I’d changed into the soft shapeless grey dress that was just respectable enough to open the door in but scruffy enough to count as comfort wear, I poured myself a glass of red wine and switched on the news with its comforting litany of bad tidings and other people’s misery: Yes, we were having a cold snap but do not be fooled, the world was getting hotter and in the future wars would be fought over water. There was flooding in the north. The nation’s debt was increasing. Greed and folly and abject materialism were to blame. We needed to increase spending on the high street. People were being laid off. And never ever forget to eat your Five a Day.

I found it soothing. I felt detached and blameless. I was not a banker or an MP or a gas-guzzler or a footballer’s wife or an oligarch; I wasn’t even American and most days I ate not just a banana but also an orange, a carrot and at least two other kinds of fruits or vegetables.

So what did Uncle Ian really want after nearly a quarter of a century’s silence?

I turned the sound up on the television: The country had gone from ‘A terrorist attack is imminent’ alert to ‘A terrorist attack is certain but might not happen until next month’ alert. I also learnt that the new kind of euro-approved, planet-saving light bulbs do in fact kill on contact when broken and need to be transported by special contamination units to a dump beyond where any government official lives until unearthed by future generations who really won’t mind their children being born with six little fingers and six little toes. And don’t you ever forget those dinosaurs. They too carried on as if they were going to live for ever, putting their kids through school, planning their holidays and saving for their pensions and then – one little meteor strike and it was all over. That’s how fragile it all was.

I switched off. There was only so much good cheer a person could take at any one time.

I wanted to talk to my mother to ask if, when Uncle Ian had spoken to her, he had told her what he really wanted. And why she hadn’t warned me that Uncle Ian was going to ring me. She warned me about everything else. Terrorists: on Tubes, buses, airplanes. Flu: Bird, Swine, Spanish. Poisoning: food, spider crossing ocean on bunch of bananas, date rape drugs dropped in one’s drink. (The trick to avoiding the latter was to stick closer to your Bacardi Breezer than a starlet to her plastic surgeon.) Radiation: Wi Fi, mobile phone, Radon, Russian assassins. So why had she not tipped me the wink that Uncle Ian was planning to call? But I had to wait as it was only six o’clock in the morning in Sydney and like me, Olivia was not a morning person. In fact, she wasn’t much of a night person either, peaking instead in the few hours between a late breakfast and her afternoon nap.

I thought about supper but unusually I wasn’t hungry. Instead I brought out my box of broken bits and pieces from its place beneath the kitchen table. With space at a premium, beneath was a very useful place. Next I protected the oak kitchen table top from further damage with a sheet of yesterday’s newspaper. Then I laid out the contents of the box. The challenge, as always, was to construct something that was, if not useful, at least decorative, from the shards of coloured glass and porcelain. I liked it best when the resulting piece ended up being both useful and decorative. It was this dual quality that attracted me to ceramics in general, the ambition it so often harboured of turning the everyday tools of life, plates and cups, pots and jugs, thimbles and boxes, vases and containers, into things of beauty.

I spent a while arranging the broken bits into different patterns, seeing if an idea would come to me but nothing did. I crouched to the level of the table top and squinted; sometimes interesting shapes appeared that way, but still nothing. No metamorphosis. What was broken tat was still just that. So I put the pieces back in the box. I stared down at the ungrateful shards and for a moment I was tempted to throw the whole thing in the bin but of course I didn’t. You don’t discard something until it’s certain there is nothing left to do. I couldn’t free myself from the thought of the maker of a piece. They might have put their heart and soul into the production. They might have looked at the finished article and felt pride at the thought of their work living on and giving pleasure to others. They might have died soon after making that particular pot, mug, plate, making it the very last thing left behind by a once living being. Or, they might have tossed if off with scant thought before taking the bus back home in time for tea. Either way I didn’t like to take the risk. So I put the box back beneath the table.

What did Uncle Ian really want?

I decided to call Gabriel.

If Uncle Ian asked about how my life had panned out in the twenty-five years since we last spoke I could at least tell him that although I was undoubtedly alive, things had not gone all my way and Gabriel was a good example of that. Gabriel was tall and fair and handsome, a doctor specialising in that most un-telegenic of fields, geriatrics. Gabriel had been born to be head boy. Born to rescue kittens caught up trees and to befriend the funny-looking kid who everyone else gave a hard time. It was all this goodness, this need to help and manage, that had made him fall in love with me, a woman who had spent years not caring if she lived or died, and if asked would admit to a slight preference for dying, a woman who still somehow always managed to get thrown back into the swim of life like the wrong kind of catch. And it had been these same characteristics that had caused Gabriel to leave once it had become clear that there was not much more he could do and that I was floating, if not happily (exaggeration gets you nowhere) but safely enough, in the shallows of existence. That and a waif-like brunette with a history of self-harm and a great deal of ‘cheerful pluck’.

And I could see his point. ‘Waif-like brunette’ conjured up attractive images of ingénue actresses and who in this world was not drawn to ‘cheerful pluck’? The self-harming, well, I would have thought there might have been a certain ‘been there, done that, bought the T-shirt’ feeling about that for him, but then we weren’t talking about what I thought.

‘What can I do?’ Gabriel had said during that endless month when he had been trying to leave our marriage with his belief in his own goodness intact. ‘I’m really worried she won’t cope. I mean, really won’t cope.’

I had looked up at his handsome anguished face and given a little shrug. ‘Let her die?’

Of course he had not thought that especially funny and nor, after two seconds’ thought had I, as that is what you could say I had done with Rose. So then I had started crying hysterically and he had wept a little too and we had held each other tight and made love and then the whole damn sorry carousel had started all over again. Until it stopped finally and for the last time.

That was three years ago. I had adored Gabriel. In truth I still did. For the first few weeks after he had left the pain of the loss was such that I hadn’t been able to sit or lie for more than a few minutes at a time, day or night. Instead I had walked and tapped and hummed and picked and turned and shrugged and muttered. At work I had ended up over-restoring a piece and had been told to take a week off. At home I made a lot of little clay hearts which I then smashed with a hammer before putting back together in hideous and unnatural shapes. But of course, as usually happens in these matters, it got easier. The sound and the fury abated and settled down to a low hum of distress that was, nevertheless, able to rise back into a crescendo at the most inopportune moments. Eventually, once a year or so had passed, there came a kind of peace. The kind that comes when there’s nothing left to fight for.

And we had remained friends. Ours had been the kind of divorce everyone admired for the civilized manner in which it was conducted. In fact, at the time I could have been forgiven for thinking that what everyone wanted most of all for Christmas that year had been a nice new divorce just like Gabriel and Eliza’s.

The waif had plumped up and her cuts had healed yet it was she, not he, who had ended the relationship. Gabriel had not come running back to me but he did still phone once a fortnight. I always imagined that these calls occurred at times when he found himself unaccountably out of sick old people, injured birds and kittens up trees, and was at loss as to what to do next. I would tell him that I was tickity boo and tum tiddily tum and never ever better. He would sound satisfied; another unfortunate had been ticked off his list, and then he’d hang up before I changed my mind and told him how I really felt. It was only a week since we had last spoken but after some hesitation I picked up the phone and dialled his mobile. I called him sufficiently rarely for him to sound concerned as he picked up. ‘Eliza, is everything all right?’

I told him everything was fine. There was silence as he waited for me to tell him more. So I said that actually I wasn’t completely fine and that I would like very much to see him. I never asked to see him. He was just finishing off at the hospital, he said. Then he would be right over.

I remembered that I was wearing my baggy grey dress and went up and changed into a somewhat less baggy grey dress. I added a short string of large fake pearls that, as my friend and colleague Beatrice had agreed when I had showed it to her, might have been taken for Chanel if Chanel made cheap-looking pearl necklaces. I reapplied some lipstick and then I went downstairs to wait.