She is planting a hydrangea in the shady bed behind the house. It is morning. The village lies stunned in its newborn quiet. The grass is silvered with dew. The soil is black, and riddled with life.
Just after ten her husband comes out; she hears his feet approaching on the gravel. They stop an arm’s length away.
‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ he says.
She rises, pain in her knees. Her hands are caked in soil. He puts out his own clean hand, palm up like a policeman to stop her.
‘No need to get up. I can say goodbye here.’
But she is already up, as he can see. She chaffs her hands to get the dirt off. Even so he winces, in his brushed blazer and clean shirt.
‘Am I not allowed to touch you?’ she says, advancing on him so that he stiffens with discomfort. ‘You do look smart.’
‘Best not.’
‘But I want to touch you!’
He smiles coldly. The day stands around him, pale grey, windless. Suddenly she feels a loss of weight, of density; she is being abandoned. She is being sealed up, in a place where there can be no touching.
‘I’ll be back at five o’clock,’ he says. After all, he is only going to the Bridge Society annual lunch in Tunbridge Wells.
She puckers her lips and leans forward, her dirty hands clasped behind her back. She receives his dry kiss. She could never touch her mother’s clothes, nor her father’s. They kissed her thus, across the chasm of departure. There is darkness down there, fathomless. She knows she mustn’t fall in. But the scented, smart atmosphere of people who are leaving tempts her. She wants to hurl herself towards them, dirty fingers clutching and clawing at their clean pressed garments. Yet she knows the chasm is there.
‘Goodbye,’ she says.
‘Goodbye.’
He is gone: she kneels down again in the earth. She picks up her trowel and digs a hole, as she used to dig in her sandpit as a child. She watches her fingers moving in the soil. She is surprised to see that her hands are old. She digs a hole for the hydrangea, and plants it, and carefully beds it in.
*
A jackdaw has got into the greenhouse and broken two of the panes. She opens the door to let it out but it continues to fly in slow circles above her head, round and round, never alighting anywhere. She goes back to the house and returns with a blanket. The bird has destroyed a whole tray of seedlings. Her plants are lying on their sides in little spills of earth. She is afraid of birds, an old fear: her father, a bad shot, the birds never dead but denatured, roiling in the grass, mad with disorganisation. This one, so black, so evilly circling, is like something she herself has caused. Her fear roams out in the world, causative. It is the loss of identity that she fears. The jackdaw, circling in its captivity, is programmatic. She grips the blanket, and at the right moment she springs up and catches it in the folds, and clasps its hooded form in her arms. It struggles: its beak pecks and pecks at her arm through the wool. She goes out into the garden and releases it.
Thomas is there, standing on the lawn.
‘What are you doing?’ he says.
She is not certain he is real. She gazes at him, confused. Yet she is speaking.
‘Oh, you’re here – I wonder why I didn’t hear the car?’
He walks across the grass towards her. She had forgotten he was so old. She folds the blanket while he kisses her cheek.
‘I rang twice but you didn’t answer. I was late leaving the house.’
‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘You’re here now.’
‘I was worried you’d start moving the boxes without me.’
‘I haven’t touched them. I’ve been terribly sensible.’
She hears her own voice; what it says is perfectly true. She knows that she spoke to her son two days ago about the boxes. He offered to help her bring them down. This morning she cleared the upstairs landing to provide easier access to the attic. She does not doubt the reality of these things; it’s just that she hasn’t, in the strictest sense, experienced them. They have happened to someone she knows well, who is sometimes with her and sometimes not. She has always been aware of this being; even as a child she knew that someone lived in her, someone who wasn’t herself. But more and more often now, this person goes away. She has come to dread her departure, yet when it occurs she doesn’t notice that she’s gone. It is when she returns that the absence is made clear.
Thomas takes her arm and they walk around the herbaceous borders.
‘Look, the oak tree’s got a face,’ she says gaily, pointing.
It’s strange that she hasn’t noticed it before, a long face with a big chin and sad eyes. It looks like a monk’s face, in its cowl of bark. She knows most of the other faces in the garden. But this one she hasn’t seen before. It stares at her from its prison in the trunk.
‘So it has,’ Thomas says. He stops to examine it. He is always a little too eager, too responsive; when he was a child she wondered whether he might not be something of a simpleton. Her dogs were the same, quivering like compasses around her, so that her husband could never get them to do a thing. She notices that Thomas has put on weight. He has pouches under his chin. His hand is hurting her arm. There are red marks on the skin where the jackdaw pecked her. She shudders at the recollection of what she did. She makes a note to tell her father, though he is dead, and the world he lived in is dead too.
‘Shall we go in?’ she says. ‘We may as well get these silly boxes over and done with.’
They turn towards the house. It is Charles who says the boxes have to go. He has them in his sights, though they have sat discreetly beneath the roof for years. Something gave him the idea of them and now he wants them gone. They are the last hidden part of her and he has found them out.
‘What’s in them, anyway?’ Thomas says.
‘Oh, just a lot of old rubbish really. Daddy says they ought to go, and I expect he’s right.’
In fact she has fought him over the boxes, and this struggle has been so bitter that it has invoked her deepest capacity for submission. He has made her see them, see them clear as day: thirty or so large boxes with her name written on, that she hasn’t opened – he forced her to admit it – since the day they first went up to the attic, where they occupy so much space that there is no longer any room to store necessities. And in the end she agreed that the situation could not continue. Truly, she felt that it couldn’t. She wept and was grateful to him. So she is surprised to see that when Thomas has brought down the boxes and retracted the ladder into the roof, there are only six of them.
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all. I double-checked.’
She remembers Charles leaving the house. Was it only this morning? He has gone to Tunbridge Wells and won’t be back until teatime.
‘I thought there were dozens,’ she says, helplessly. She sits down on the landing carpet.
Thomas opens one of the boxes and looks inside. He takes out her crumpled christening gown, her old almanac, a doll with a tartan tam-o’-shanter who she recalls – oh, the dreadful surge of memory! – is named Clarissa.
‘Daddy wants it all to go to a charity shop!’ she bursts out. ‘I can’t bear it! Don’t let him send my things away!’
Thomas looks stricken. He kneels down beside her.
‘Of course he can’t give them away,’ he says. ‘They’re your things. It’s up to you what happens to them.’
‘But I promised – I promised that by the time he came back they’d be gone!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Thomas mutters.
He is angry. But not with her. He picks up Clarissa, turns her stiff body in his hands.
‘I suppose Alexa might like to look at some of these things,’ he says.
Her voice is meek. ‘I dare say she might.’
He sighs. ‘What else is there?’
‘Not much – some books, a few mementoes. It’s a silly thing: they mean so much to me, but they’d mean nothing to a complete stranger.’
The truth is that she can’t remember what is inside the boxes. He is silent.
‘We’ve got less space than you do, you know,’ he says presently. ‘It seems ridiculous.’
She pouts and looks at the carpet. ‘Then I suppose Daddy’s right. It’ll all have to go.’
He sighs again, tormented. This is an old alliance, older than Thomas himself, for its source is her own first loneliness, when her dolls – Clarissa, she recalls, was one such – befriended her and offered her their pliant hearts. Thomas, as a baby, had something of this pliancy, this bright expectant blankness; and after Howard – greedy little brute, always thumping her with his fat fists – she rather doted on Thomas, whose round eyes followed her with such astonished love. He used to cry whenever she moved out of his line of vision.
‘All right, then,’ he says finally. ‘We’ll fit them in somewhere. Though God knows what Tonie’s going to say.’
At the mention of Tonie’s name she feels the shiver of compunction that normally only her husband can elicit. She recalls taking Tonie blackberrying once in the hedges along the road outside the village; recalls the way Tonie persisted at each bush until she had stripped it of every last one of its fruits. Her own method is to cover more ground, grazing whatever falls to her hand.
‘Oh dear – I don’t want to cause any trouble.’
‘No, it’s all right. It’s fine.’
She beams at him. She finds that she wants him to go, now that he has taken her burden of submission from her. In the end his availability grates on her. It was sweet in a child, but people cannot be children all their lives. These days she finds that after all she prefers Howard.
‘Oh, you are kind,’ she says. ‘Shall we take them down to the car? I expect you have to rush off.’
He smiles, a peculiar smile she hasn’t seen before.
‘I thought I might stay for lunch,’ he says.
‘Oh!’ she says. ‘Well, of course, you’re very welcome, if you haven’t anything else to do.’
But even after lunch he doesn’t seem inclined to go.
‘Doesn’t someone have to fetch Alexa from school?’ she asks.
He smiles again. ‘She’s going to a friend’s.’
‘Well, I was only going to take the dog for a walk. Don’t feel you have to come.’
He says, ‘Would you like me to come?’
It strikes her as a very impolite thing to say.
‘Yes,’ she says coldly. ‘Of course. That would be very nice.’
They take Flossie up the lane, and in a ditch full of reeds and brambles they find a tiny deer, dead.
‘How sad!’ she says. ‘A car must have hit it.’
She gazes at the little shrivelled muzzle buzzing with flies, the closed eyes, the tangled infant legs in their cold bed of winter grasses. It can only have happened a day or two ago. She looks up and to her surprise sees the doe, standing motionless in the shadowy lane ahead of them. She grips Thomas’s arm.
‘Look – it’s the mother. See how unafraid she is. She’s looking for her child. She knows it’s here somewhere and she’s waiting for it to come back. Oh, how sad!’
The doe lifts her head. Her large almond-shaped eyes are pools of blackness. They wear a frightful expression. Flossie barks. For a while the doe doesn’t move, but at last she goes heavily back into the trees.
‘Oh, how touching.’ She unclips Flossie’s lead. Beside her Thomas gives a sort of gasp. She turns and sees to her astonishment that he is crying.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she says.