‘She’ll be pushing it out now,’ said Isabel, who knew everything about babies. I nodded, humping the canvas picnic bag over my shoulder while she shook a stone out of her sandal. I didn’t care about the baby that day, because Isabel was going to let me fish off the rocks with her fishing-line for the first time.
Isabel held me tight round the waist as the waves sucked below us. The water was deep here, and dangerous. If we fell in we knew we’d be battered against the rocks. We were far out, too far out. My face was sticky with spray and every time I opened my mouth I tasted salt. The tide was on the turn, surging past our feet. Isabel’s hands held me tight as I leaned out to throw the line clear of the rocks, and then we sat back in our niche of rock to wait for the tug. A hundred yards away, on safe rock, a man waved his arms at us. His mouth opened and closed but we couldn’t hear anything above the noise of the waves.
‘Stupid idiot,’ said Isabel. ‘Still, we’d better go back and see if she’s had the baby yet.’
I don’t remember the journey back, only my father, his face suddenly smooth with happiness, telling us it was a boy. He said it over and over, and Isabel and I looked at each other, a quick, furtive look. Then Isabel said, ‘Oh, a boy. Never mind, Neen,’ and she kneeled down and put her arms round me, mouthing over my head to our father, ‘Neen wanted it to be a girl.’ I’d wanted nothing, but I hid my face in Isabel’s shirt because it was nice to feel her holding me. After a while my father said that he was going to the hospital, and he went.
They called the baby Colin. I thought about him a lot for the first day, and then forgot him. My mother was in hospital for ten days, and that was what I mostly thought about. Isabel put me to bed each night while our father visited the hospital. There must have been other adults around, friends and neighbours, but I only remember Isabel sitting on the linen chest by the bath squeezing shampoo on to my hair and then rubbing it in.
When my mother came back, she had Colin with her. He seemed to be stuck to her all the time so that whenever I wanted to climb into her lap he was there. She bottle-fed him, because she wanted to get back to work in the studio as soon as possible, and a girl was going to come in every day to look after him. But he fed and screamed, fed and screamed. Once she upset the hot water in which the feeding-bottle stood, and it ran over his foot so he screamed more. But when he stopped feeding she lifted him up and held his face against hers. She shut her eyes and whispered things to him which I couldn’t hear.
She was tired for a long time, and not well. I remember creeping in very quietly and lying down beside her on the big double bed while she slept. She opened her eyes and saw me and smiled. Then Colin screamed.
‘You ought to smack him, then he wouldn’t make so much noise,’ I told her. But she toiled out of bed and heated his milk.
Colin was three months old. Once I heard my parents talking about Isabel. ‘It’s strange that she doesn’t bother with him, when you think how wonderful she is with Neen.’
Isabel never asked to hold Colin. Sometimes our mother would say, ‘Here you are, would you like to hold him?’ Isabel would let him loll in her lap until he was taken away. Afterwards she would hoist me up into her lap, and tell me stories, because she could read and I couldn’t. I leaned against her, talking in the baby language we spoke to our dolls. We tended Rosina and Mandy more than ever, rocking them, soothing them, dressing and undressing them. If Colin was in the room we wouldn’t even glance at him.
One evening, after we’d gone to bed, we began a game of babies. Isabel took the sheet and laid me in the middle of it, and then wrapped it round me tightly, like a shawl. At first I liked it and lay there sucking my thumb and smiling at her, talking baby talk round the thumb. But then that got boring. I began to struggle free of the sheet. I was on my hands and knees, then on my feet in the deep trough in the middle of the bed.
‘Naughty baby!’ shouted Isabel, laughing, egging me on. I began to jump, bouncing on the mattress until the springs twanged. I jumped and jumped, screaming with excitement at every bounce. Isabel began to jump too, making me bounce twice, once on my jump and once on hers, while her long hair flew round us both. Suddenly the door opened. My mother was at the bed almost before we’d seen her. She grabbed my arm, and Isabel’s.
‘Shut up!’ she shouted. ‘Shut up! SHUT UP! You’ve woken him again and I’d just got him to sleep.’
Her face glared at us, white and frayed. She looked as if she’d like to kill us. I shrank towards Isabel. Suddenly my mother turned and went out of the room. I think she was afraid of starting to hit us and not being able to stop. We stood silent, listening to Colin’s thin, rising howl. Isabel’s cheeks were still red with jumping. I began to cry.
‘Ssh, Neen!’ she said. Don’t make a noise or she’ll come back.’
She got the sheet and wrapped me up in it again. This time I lay passive, staring up at her while she patted me to sleep, the way we patted our dolls.
When I woke up it was morning. Strong light was falling through the half-open curtains on to the lino, where Isabel sat cross-legged, reading a book. I wriggled the sheet loose, and rolled over. The house was still and quiet, full of sunlight, and Isabel looked up at me, turned down the corner of her page and smiled.
We must have played for an hour or so. Not dolls this time. I drew pictures, and Isabel made up stories about them. It must have been very early, in spite of the sun, because the house stayed quiet and the baby didn’t cry. Suddenly Isabel said, ‘I’m going to see Colin.’ I stared at her in surprise, because neither of us ever went in to see Colin in the mornings. Even if we’d wanted to, we knew we mustn’t ever wake him up. I remember I had a purple wax crayon in my fist. Isabel opened our door and went out, and I began to draw again. But straight away, she was back. She knelt down opposite me, poked her face close to mine, and announced. ‘I don’t think Colin’s very well. You’d better come and have a look, Neen.’
She took my hand and led me out on to the landing. Colin slept in the tiny room over the stairs, and his door was open. Isabel pushed me in ahead of her, and I looked through the bars of his cot. But there was no Colin there. Instead there was a strange thing. I put my arm through the cot bar and felt it, and it was solid and cool, like my wax crayon. I looked at Isabel.
Where’s our baby?’
She pointed into the cot. ‘That’s Colin. He’s just gone a funny colour.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I looked again and saw that she was right.
We’d better go and get dressed,’ said Isabel, and we went out, closing the door carefully behind us, and back into our bedroom. We didn’t make much noise, but something must have woken our mother, because a few minutes later we heard her padding along to the bathroom. After she’d pulled the chain she went to Colin’s room, and a second later we heard her begin to scream.
That was my brother, who died of cot-death when he was three months old. Suddenly I wonder if Richard even knows that there was ever such a person.
Chapter Nine
Alex came down with a salmon yesterday. He’d driven through the night when the motorways were almost empty, with the salmon lying on the back seat. It was hot in the car at midnight, he said. He had music on and the windows open as if he was driving in another country, not here. He didn’t stay long. He talked to Edward for an hour in Isabel’s room, and then he ate bread and cheese in the kitchen and drove away again. But Edward looks happier, and the salmon was left for us. Alex caught it himself. He’s on holiday in Scotland, alone, fishing. The fish kept him company on the way down, wrapped in a freezer pack, and now Alex has gone back the five hundred miles, driving back to the rowan trees and the heather, which is just beginning to flush with colour. He looked round Isabel’s garden as if it wasn’t real, and his car keys kept jingling in his hand. He was elsewhere in his mind. I’ve always liked Alex, and I liked him even more when I saw him come in carrying the salmon like a baby.
Today I’m going to cook. We’ll eat together, in the dark, cool dining-
room. I’m going to bake the salmon, very slowly, with dill and juniper berries. I’ll serve it just warm, with hollandaise sauce, with new potatoes, French beans, a big ripe cucumber which tastes of fruit, not water, and plum tomatoes from Isabel’s greenhouse. They’re so ripe that they’re splitting at the stalk. And then an apple tart and a gooseberry fool. It’ll take most of the day, especially on Isabel’s cooker. We’ll eat at seven, when the baby’s been fed and bathed and with luck will sleep for two hours, even three. Richard is in London today, being interviewed by a financial journalist, but he’ll be back at five.
This morning I took the fish out of the freezer and unwrapped it. It was a big, lithe, silvery creature, hardly a scale on it damaged. Alex had packed it carefully, with a sprig of heather in its mouth. He had gutted it, and the flaps of its belly lay neatly together, like lips. It would be sweeter in flavour, more intense, less fatty than a farmed animal. He had wiped the blood off it. It lay on its long dish arched a little, as if remembering a leap.
Edward came in as I was spreading a piece of foil loosely over the fish to keep the flies off while it thawed. It should have been muslin, because foil can rub off the scales, but I hadn’t thought to buy any when I went shopping early that morning.
‘Is that for tonight?’ he asked, and I nodded.
‘Do you want a hand?’
I looked up, thinking quickly. I never give away the jobs I like best, I’m not that sort of cook.
‘You can get the dining-room ready. Polish the table and dust the chairs. That’ll save me a lot of time.’
‘OK,’ he said, surprising me again. ‘Where’s the stuff?’
I found rags for him, and a hardened lump of beeswax polish. Isabel has no dusters. The house is neither clean nor very dirty, and it reminds me of how things were when we were little, with sand choking the wash-basin, shells and seaweed behind the kitchen sink, too much rubbish in the tiny bin which my mother lined with newspaper, and dead bluebottles lying for weeks on window-ledges until they seemed like friends. Sometimes Isabel pours Jeyes Fluid down her drains, or boiling water on to an ants’ nest which is too near the kitchen, as our mother did. When I watch Isabel do these things I am at home, as if something is going on which is beyond liking, beyond even love. There’s a way that my mother would lift the corner of a sheet or a blouse to her face and sniff it for damp after she’d brought in the washing. I’ve made myself stop doing this, but Isabel goes on. She lines her compost bin with newspaper, too, so that the parcel of peelings and eggshells falls apart soggily when I lift it out.
I am smiling, and Edward is looking at me, ready to smile too.
The tart will take longest. I’ve bought white Normandy butter, pastry flour, three pounds of sharp, sweet Jonagold apples. They are not the right apples, but I won’t get better in the fag-end of the season, before the new apples come in. They must be cut evenly, in fine crescents of equal thickness which will lap round in ring after ring, hooping inwards, glazed with apricot jam. The tart must cook until the tips of the apple rings are almost black, but the fruit itself is still plump and moist. When you close your eyes and bite you must taste caramel, sharp apple, juice and the short, sandy texture of sweet pastry all at once. No one taste should be stronger than another. The pastry is made, and resting in the fridge. One piece of equipment which Isabel does possess, among her rusty whisks and wooden spoons which smell of onion, is a huge marble slab with a broken edge. I made the pastry on it, cutting the butter into the heaped flour and rubbing it in quickly, lightly, so the paste just held together.
I’m simmering the reduction for the, hollandaise sauce. It smells of bay leaf, more than I think it should. I wonder if I should add a second slice of onion, and then decide not to. It bubbles and thickens, releasing the spiciness of mace and a sharp vinegar smell. I love making sauces, real sauces which glisten with egg-yolks and lump after lump of butter. I strain the reduction, thin it slightly and begin to whisk in the egg-yolks. Now for the stage I like best. I’ve got a pan of water simmering on a ring, but it’s still too high, the water bubbling with more energy than it needs. The controls on these rings are crude. I turn it down and the water seems to go to sleep. Up, and it bubbles. I fiddle again, and at last I get what I want. The water squirms, almost unnoticeably alive. I place my bowl of sauce over it and put in the first lump of butter, watch it start to slither, and then whisk. I drop in another lump, whisk again, and go on, watching it thicken, checking the heat, making sure the sauce stays smooth as ointment and doesn’t curdle. There are twelve lumps of butter to go in. The sauce swallows them all, gleaming, fattening on what I’ve given it. I let it cook a little longer, still whisking gently. Now it looks right. I dip in a clean wooden spoon and the sauce coats it perfectly.
The last bit is easy. Lemon juice, a touch of salt and pepper. I dip in the wooden spoon again, run my finger over its back, then taste, closing my eyes.
‘I bet that’s good,’ says Richard behind me.
I turn and hold out the spoon. ‘Have some if you want. You’re back early.’
‘It didn’t take as long as I thought.’
‘Did it go all right?’
‘Fine. It’ll be in next Thursday’s FT’
He’s pleased with himself, the man who’s been somewhere and done something. He smells of trains. He looks at the fish, ready to cook now, wrapped in its shroud of buttered foil.
‘What’s that? Alex’s salmon?’
‘Yes.’
He hovers, smiling, and I put the sauce to one side. ‘It’s time to put it in,’ I say, and lift the salmon. Richard kneels and opens the oven door.
‘It’s not very hot,’ he says.
‘It doesn’t need to be.’
The salmon just fits. I have already checked, so I’m not surprised when it slides in by a whisker. The salmon is in the oven, the potatoes ready to boil, the tomatoes in a warm heap on the table, to be cut as late as possible and sprinkled with chopped basil and brown sugar. The beans are waiting in a colander. The tomatoes are intensely red against the damaged surface of the table. Their skins are tough. I’ll score them with the point of a knife, dip them in boiling water and slip them out of their skins.
Richard has left the outside door open and a bright tongue of sunlight lies on the stone floor. I think of flowers on the table, of a last-minute picking of warm gooseberries and crushing them with a fork, of the cream I’ve already whipped to fold into them. I think of our seven bodies, mine, Richard’s, Isabel’s, the baby’s, Alex’s, Susan’s, Edward’s. Alex will be back by his river, a halo of flies round his head. The heat is thinner up there, burning the bracken brown and the rowan berries first to orange, then deep red. The waters he fishes are so sweet that when he’s thirsty he cups his hands, dips them and drinks. Isabel is sitting in the rocking-chair, rocking back and forward, back and forward, her eyes half-open. The baby is with Susan, visiting her mother. Susan’s tied him into a sling and walked him across the fields for tea, his little bare head covered in a denim sun-hat. Edward has polished the table and laid it for five, and now he’s typing a long letter to Alex into his lap-top. But it’s too hot to think and his fingers slip on the keys. A small plane has gone over twice, with a long streamer dragging behind it which says ‘Visit Damiano’s Dreamworld’.
And Richard’s here. ‘Do you want a drink?’ he asks. I look through the window and suddenly the shadows seem bluer, looser. The endless afternoon is nearly over.
They’re all sitting down, waiting, even Isabel. I can hear them from the kitchen: a laugh, then a murmur, like the sound of an audience settling in its seats. Everything is on the table now except the salmon. It’s been out of the oven for half an hour, resting and cooling inside its foil. I take a pair of scissors and cut a corner of foil, run the line of the blade along it, then fold it back from the fish. I smear my two hands with butter and ease them under the salmon, and then lift. It comes up perfectly, its bright silvery skin intact, and I lay it down again on a bed of fresh dill, o
n a clean white plate. I wash my hands.
When I bring it in Isabel begins to clap, lightly, her hands level with her eyes so that I can’t see them. Edward claps too, his face set in the little ironic smile which is like a tic with him. Richard does not clap. As I put down the heavy dish I see him swallow the saliva that has gathered in his mouth.
‘Ooh!’ says Susan. Isn’t it beautiful? It seems a shame to eat it.’
But we eat it. Its flesh falls from the bones, the colour of coral. Its spine shows like a ruined nave. Its eyes have sunk in cooking and they look inward, filmed like an old man’s eyes. Tatters of skin and scale hang from the bones as we eat on, filling and refilling our plates, each mouthful of fish dipped in the sauce, which is not golden at all in this light, but pale as primroses. The salmon’s flesh is creamy, with a faint, fresh tang of the sea.
‘You can’t buy salmon like this,’ says Richard. ‘It’s a shame Alex didn’t stay to eat it.’
Isabel puts out her hand and touches Edward’s sleeve. ‘You’ll be going up there yourself next week, won’t you?’ she says. ‘You’ll be eating salmon every night.’
‘Until you’re sick of it, like a London apprentice,’ says Richard, and lifts his glass again, and drinks. He’s drunk a lot already. Isabel looks at him, a slight frown stitching itself on to her forehead. Of course, I realize suddenly, Isabel’s sober. She can’t drink because she’s feeding the baby. That’s why she has that removed, censorious look.
I’m far from sober. As soon as the salmon landed on the table I began to drink. My day of kitchen power was over. Let them stub out cigarettes in the bones of the salmon if they wanted.
The tart is finished and waiting, the cream whipped. The gooseberry fool is chilling. I need do nothing but eat and drink. I drank the first couple of glasses quickly, straight off, on an almost empty stomach, and instantly the room glowed and swam. Now, drinking the third, I remember the wine I had earlier, with Richard. I feel myself raised up as the blue shine of evening strokes the long table, the wrecked and polished skin of the salmon. There are swifts jinking outside the window, and swallows going home to their nests under the barn eaves. I think of owls, fucking the wind. My body goes soft with the thought of it.