My House Is Falling Down Page 15

  On waking, my body is tense, schooled for action that will not present itself here. Before, when I woke in Angus’s arms, I would lie in his embrace, silently repeating to myself, I am here, I am his, this is now.

  This is now. And now, awake, I listen to the family rising on the boat next door and curse the fact that Angus’s neighbours are not all full-grown. The noises of children getting ready for school carry through air and water, and anxiety consumes me. Dearly, I wish those children were not there. I crave the sounds and feel of my own daughters, and the feeling intensifies each time I visit. Beneath the slatted, wooden ceiling I lie, thinking about all the reasons I have produced for myself to justify my presence here, and knowing they cannot convince me of anything but the truth: that as long as I wake up in Verity’s hold I am – as mothers go – at worst a fraud and at best a temporary absentee. In a few hours’ time, I will be home again; but in the morning light of a city I do not love and in which I do not live I can defend myself to myself no longer.

  There is a text from Mark, sent at 08.13. Mel needs her eye drops. Where are they? They are in my bag, is the answer – in the kitchen here. They shouldn’t be but they are. Now, Mark will need to go to the chemist to buy some and then take them to school for her. It should be me doing that. It should. If I were away for work, it might be different, but I am not. I am soon to eat a croissant with Angus, on his roof.

  At the end of the text, Mark has written: ‘Missing you.’

  I am not hungry.

  I get up. I see other children walking along the Embankment with their mothers and my homesickness and guilt translates to confusion. I don’t know where the schools are, that they attend. Life in central London is a mystery to me. Where do normal things happen? The children I see here wear gingham-style dresses. The pattern is similar to the twins’ uniform but in a different colour. Little kids, but not mine. I can’t watch. I turn away, pace the short deck, observe the mud exposed by a low tide. It is humid and the sky is heavy. I shower and afterwards make coffee for Angus, wrapped in a towel. I try not to think about what is happening at home.

  Next door, the littlest child and her mother are planting flowers in a tub. The littlest child is too small for school.

  They look happy.

  They have a tub on the roof of a boat.

  Mel and Miranda and I have a whole flower bed. I can be a good mother gardening with her kids, for I have kids and a garden, and stuff to plant in it.

  But for everything there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am here and my daughters are there, and I understand the equation. I am able to see how it should be. The answer is right in front of me.

  I get dressed. I do not pull on one of Angus’s jerseys over a pair of knickers: I did so in the profligate early stages, when the combination signified the kind of dissolution that I wanted to dwell in. I don’t have the patience for that version of myself any more. I put on my own clothes, ready for a morning that I have disowned, and responsibilities from which I have already cast myself adrift. I am poised to chivvy and encourage other people into a full day but I am not where they are.

  Re-entering the bedroom, I lean over the bed and touch Angus’s cheek lightly. His face is rumpled, and slightly damp. The skin around his eyes, when he opens them, is creased. For once, he looks old. I don’t care. Yet I am aware that he is at the unfamiliar end of life for me; that the people I am missing are new, smooth-skinned, fresh.

  ‘Hello, beautiful,’ he murmurs. ‘You’re dressed already.’

  ‘I made you some coffee.’

  He reaches up for me, pulls my arm downwards so that the rest of me has to follow, for him to kiss. I am partially resistant, kneeling awkwardly beside the bed.

  I can’t see the Embankment from here but I know that by now the children outside will have disappeared and instead, there will be dog-walkers and runners, and people in suits and tight skirts walking purposefully along the riverside. Those who are talking and texting on their phones will far outnumber those who are not. School will have begun in London, in the suburbs, the countryside and elsewhere. The register is being called all over Britain.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s halfway through the morning for some people. Your neighbours are already planting flowers.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It’s time to get up.’

  ‘No cuddle?’

  ‘No. You have to get up; you have practice to do.’

  He yawns. His teeth are good. Good teeth, good hair, good skin. Good everything.

  ‘Quite so, maestro.’

  Good mood, too. How can a person be consistently so easygoing? He is always happy. Always. In the mornings, the first thing he does is beam at me. It’s incendiary, the love that it begets. Bending over the twins’ cots when they were babies, it was the same: their early-morning smiles set my heart on fire.

  I stand up and Angus says, ‘Shall I make us some pancakes?’

  ‘Toast will do.’

  ‘Hmm. Time was when you would have eaten pancakes all morning with me. Is something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good, because that reminds me: perhaps you’d like to have a go at pruning my pot plants.’

  At home, last week, I pulled a lot of excess cow parsley – unruly, rampant, gorgeous, and stealing a march, as always, on the nettles. The earth was flinty and cool. On Verity, some terracotta water-cooling jars, large and Italianate, contain tobacco flowers and geraniums in Miracle-Gro potting compost.

  He says, ‘Obviously, you will know how to do it, nutcase, being a country girl and all that.’

  It is such a reasonable request – for me to do this one small thing for Angus – but I am going to reject it. I am going to explain that I can’t prune them because I’m useless with flowers but the truth is that I have no energy to tend anything else. Angus, I love. But his home, his environment, his carefully composed miniature garden – no. His babies I will never have. This boat we did not buy together. This city I would never choose. Why would I get involved with his geraniums?

  I say, ‘Honestly, I’m so bad with flowers.’

  He says, ‘Honestly? Honestly, sweetheart, you don’t like it here, do you? London, I mean. Admit it. Deep down, you don’t feel at home.’

  And I think, Never mind deep down: right here on top I don’t feel at home. Right here where my skin prickles and my eyes water and my hackles rise, and the breeze from the river feels foreign every time it catches me, right here on my surface I do not feel remotely at home.

  ‘Seriously,’ he says, ‘do you think we will ever live together?’

  I do not reply.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s try a different question. When are you going to stop making excuses?’

  ‘Flowers.’

  Mark dumps four carrier bags of shopping on the kitchen table before passing me a bunch of white freesias.

  ‘Wow.’ I stare at them in my hand. ‘Thank you. I don’t think I deserve these.’

  He crams six microwaveable cartons of lasagne and risotto into the freezer drawer, says, ‘You’re my wife. You get flowers.’

  ‘Why have you bought all these ready-meals?’

  ‘For me and the kids.’

  ‘But why? It looks like you’re stockpiling for a war.’

  ‘Your analogy,’ he says, running his hands through his hair. ‘Not mine.’

  I watch the curls slide and rearrange themselves around his face. It’s something I always found pleasing, the way they do that.

  ‘Luce,’ he says. ‘I want you to go away with him.’

  Like a freezing wind blasting open a door not properly closed in the first place, his words tear into me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go away with him. Just bloody-well do it and be done with it. Go. Spend some proper time. I’ll take the children to Cornwall with me.’

  ‘What? No! We’re all going together!’

  ‘No. We’re not. It’s okay, I’ve talked to Jay and Lisa.
I can share their au pair. We can manage perfectly well without you. They’re up for it.’

  ‘But I don’t want that!’

  ‘Well, it’s kind of too bad, Luce. Because I’m damned if I know what you want, either. All I know is that I am sick of this. Don’t argue. Please. I’ve decided.’

  ‘But Mark!’

  ‘It’s fixed. Don’t panic, we’ll all come back. But then that’s it. After that, I will do no more.’

  My ears are ringing. I begin to shiver. The weeks ahead will shrink to days, and then hours, and then minutes. Time will run out and I will no longer be able to avoid having to face the end of something.

  Holes everywhere. The bastards have eaten through four of Mark’s jerseys, and two of mine: they are beyond repair. I am up to my eyes in moth repellent, folding our wool stuff in zip-lock bags and thinking how my relationship with Angus has eaten away at the fabric of all our lives; how just like a moth-eaten garment, everything now is pockmarked by holes. Holes in my marriage, and holes in Angus’s life, with me: holes in our appetites, our sleep, our self-respect, our sense of what is real. All our formerly unabridged lives are now divided, and what, before, were relatively smooth passages through the weeks and months have become a confusing and unedifying mess. It makes little sense, to any of us. It probably looks insane.

  I put the jerseys in a bag in the porch, ready to take out for recycling, and regretting in particular the loss of the pale pink one Mark bought for my birthday the year the twins were born.

  Just inside the porch, standing on one leg, and so still it might be inanimate, is a bird. It is a sparrowhawk, not a rare bird but certainly uncommon and not one to choose proximity to humans. I have never seen one so close before. I approach it cautiously but it doesn’t move; its head is downward but not quite tucked into its breast, as if it cannot muster the energy to get properly comfortable. I look into its nearest blank, onyx eye. Statue bird. I am not even sure it registers me.

  I don’t know what to do, so I ring the RSPB helpline: I tell the woman who answers that the bird is surely sick and I am worried it will die tonight. ‘Leave it,’ she advises. ‘There’s not a lot else you can do. It will almost certainly fly away.’

  ‘It won’t, I don’t think. But thanks, anyway.’

  I go outside again twice, the second time just before midnight, to see how the bird is getting on. It doesn’t budge. As I lean in towards it, its tail feathers twitch very slightly and it defecates.

  ‘Sorry, birdie,’ I say, backing away. ‘Sorry.’

  I lie in bed, trying to picture Mark and the twins at Jay and Lisa’s place in Cornwall. They’ll go to the beach in the morning and eat cake at the cafe overlooking the bay. Lisa will be leaving in a couple of days, to run an obstetrics course at a hospital in Sierra Leone; the au pair will take over. Lisa’s children, too, will briefly be motherless, but with good reason. The cause of her not infrequent absences is unimpeachable. Jay will want to know why it is that I am sleeping in London, with another man – if Mark tells him, that is. It will be difficult for him not to. I worry. I have put us all in a terrible position. The problem feels too intractable to be real.

  The sky outside is starless and so black that I can only just make out the odd shape in the room. Since meeting Mark, I have begun to treasure the dark, in the way you can come afresh to cherish an old friendship long taken for granted. The blankness is consoling, a respite from busyness and confusion. We live a life of clarity and lustre, Mark and I. Our windows are clean, our walls white. Gloom and shadows make lip-reading hard, so everything we do is illuminated. Overhead lights are ablaze even on bright days. It was a bit of a shock when I first got together with Mark, adjusting to the glare. I have made the case for strategically placed low lamps but soft lighting only irritates him. I have never had a candlelit supper with my husband. We make love with the bedside light on, or we did. I was self-conscious the first few times that happened. I felt like a subject, lit – and once, when drowsy and full of wine, the thought crossed my mind that if I married this man I would be in the spotlight always, cast permanently in a strong supporting role in the silent movie of his life. ‘Don’t be daft,’ he laughed, when I put it to him. ‘You’re my leading lady.’

  I remember one of the first things I said to Angus: ‘Turn off the light and keep talking. I want to be loved in the dark.’

  When I open the front door, first thing in the morning, I am hoping to see the bird gone. Rigid, it is lying on one side where it has fallen. There is a large, pooled mass of unnatural-looking white foam emanating from its mouth.

  ‘Ohhh,’ I say, recoiling involuntarily. ‘Oh, poor you.’

  I find some thick gardening gloves in the porch and gently lift the bird in both hands. Is it infected? Was it poisoned? I am repulsed, and ashamed of being so, by the small body that once contained life and does so no longer.

  I place it out of sight around one side of the house. I can bury it later, before I leave. Right now, I must deal with its toxic spew. Running hot water and bleach into a bucket, I notice a large crack running vertically up the wall, in the corner of the room. I’ve seen it many times before but its significance has failed to register until now. Subsidence. Oh God. Now, my house is falling down.

  I sigh. Everything feels sad.

  Di says, ‘Sorry I didn’t call back last night. I was wondering which moron was trying to reach me in the middle of Top Gear.’

  ‘This one. You know, you really are a bloke.’

  ‘With very big tits. Where are you now?’

  ‘On the train.’

  ‘Have they left already?’

  ‘Yesterday morning.’

  ‘Does it feel weird?’

  ‘I’m already missing the girls like hell. But Jay and Lisa’s kids are like cousins to them, and Mark will get to paint his Cornish stuff.’

  ‘And you’re en route to a fortnight with Angus!’

  There is a scuffle at the other end of the line, followed by a noisy clatter. ‘Brian!’ Di snaps, her voice muffled but clearly raised. ‘No!’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ she says, more clearly now. ‘Never get a Jack Russell.’

  ‘It’s not on my list.’

  ‘Good, because you’d only have another aggravating chap to attend to, and you’ve presumably got enough of those already. Are you excited? You must be.’

  ‘It’s just a break, Di.’

  Di sighs.

  ‘I really hope this works out for you,’ she says. ‘You don’t sound very okay.’

  ‘I’m such a despicable person.’

  ‘No, you’re not! You haven’t deceived anyone.’

  ‘It only makes me not a liar. It doesn’t make me a great wife, or a great mother, or a great anything else, for that matter. I’m beginning to think the truth is almost as damaging as deceit.’

  ‘No way. Deceit is far worse.’

  ‘Possibly, but if you’re causing pain to people, the difference that telling the truth makes is probably negligible. And in a way, being truthful has its own particular pitfalls. Bit by bit, you let yourself off your own hook by reminding yourself of your own fidelity – ha bloody ha – yet the fact is, you’re still making a mess, regardless.’

  ‘As in, you’re off to rob a bank but as far as you’re concerned, it’s okay because you’ve told someone beforehand that’s what you’re going to do?’

  ‘God. When you put it like that.’

  Di says, ‘Mate, listen. I’m not judging you. The truth is, I’m sitting here as married and bored and disappointed as the next woman, watching you do something I would do myself, if I had the guts. If I could be on a boat, away from Dave, having amazing love with a dreamy-looking musician, I’d be there like a shot.’

  I tip the contents of my bag out on to the bed. ‘Our bed’, Angus calls it.

  In amongst the jeans and jerseys are a few new things: lace and silk underwear, a short cotton skirt, a silk summer dress and a couple of decent blouses. Lipsti
ck, mascara, rose-pink nail polish, and a bikini, in sailor stripes; French, and slippery with newness.

  ‘Here I am,’ I say. ‘This is it. This is me.’

  He gives me a set of keys, and with them a bunch of flowers. He says, ‘You mentioned once that you love freesias,’ and, ‘Now, you can come and go as you please.’

  Later, I walk by myself to the nearest grocer. That way, I can return with milk and eggs, and say, ‘Hello, sweetheart, I’m back.’

  He says, ‘Shall we take a look at the Impressionists exhibition?’

  He says, ‘Yippee! No more teaching and no more gigs until September!’

  He says, ‘The weather’s looking fantastic for our trip.’

  He says what people say when time is on their side.

  There seem suddenly to be a lot of parties. Behind imposing white-stuccoed houses, in gardens saturated with roses, Angus introduces me to his friends.

  They say, ‘Where did you two meet, exactly?’

  ‘How long have you known this old reprobate?’

  ‘What is it you do?’

  ‘And you live where?’

  I take long, hard looks at the women. Angus is not eyeing up these musicians and agents and college administrators and gallery curators, but I am. They have eaten reasonably and exercised moderately for most of their lives. They have long-held interests and reservoirs of knowledge. Clear skin, attractive clothes, well-cut hair. There’s evidence here and there of the odd procedure but for the most part they seem to have shunned plastic surgery, and if not, they have kept it subtle: for them, it seems, excess of anything but work is a vice. They are stylish, elegant and forceful. They have a fair number of marriages and divorces under their belts. They have clocked up achievements, reproduced well into the future, been lost along the way, and survived. They have, it seems, nothing left to lose, no deterrents in the pursuit of more.