‘Nothing,’ she says, and lowers the palette knife to her lap.
‘What is that?’ he says, in the kind of tone that implies she might very easily reply just a hand-grenade, darling.
‘Nothing,’ she says again, and as she does so it comes to her what the palette knife is doing on the sofa, instead of in her studio. She’d been using it in here, mixing some plaster of Paris on the coffee-table, which is not something she would normally ever do. The house is for living, the studio is for working. But it had been hot and the short distance down the garden had seemed so long.
She becomes aware that Ted is still looking at her, this time with an expression close to horror.
‘What?’ she says.
He doesn’t reply. He seems to be in some kind of trance, staring at her with a kind of guardedness, a nervous fascination.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ She sees that he is staring at her neck. She raises her hand to the spot and feels her pulse, leaping beneath her touch. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Huh?’ he says, and appears to come back from wherever he was. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, why are you staring at me like that?’
He looks away, fiddles with the remote control. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, then says, suddenly defensive, ‘Like what?’
‘Like I’m some kind of freak.’
He shifts in his seat. ‘Don’t be silly. I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t.’
Elina pushes herself forward and struggles from the sofa. The noise of the football is suddenly too much. At one point she thinks she won’t make it to standing, that she won’t be able to straighten her legs, that they will buckle beneath her or that whatever it is that is inside her will fall out. But she grips the sofa arm and Ted lurches forward and seizes her wrist and together they hoist her up and she moves across the room, bent over a little at the waist.
She has been overcome by a desire to look at the baby. She needs to do this, she’s noticed, at regular intervals. To check he’s there, to check she hasn’t dreamt it all, to check he’s still breathing, to check he’s quite as beautiful as she remembered him to be, quite as astonishingly perfect. She limps towards the Moses basket – it must be nearly time for another of those painkillers – and peers in. He is there, wrapped in a blanket, fists clenched beside his ears, his eyes screwed tight, his mouth shut in a firm pout, as if tackling this sleeping business with all the seriousness and concentration it deserves. She puts a hand to his chest and, even though she knows he’s fine, she can see that he’s fine, she feels a surge of relief flood through her. He’s breathing, she tells herself, he’s alive, he’s still here.
She makes for the kitchen, holding on to the cooker for support, chiding herself. Why does she constantly fear that he’s going to die? That he will slip away from her, out of this life. It’s hysterical, she tells herself, as she scans the shelves for the teapot, and ridiculous.
The next morning the palette knife is on the floor next to the sofa. Elina gets down on her hands and knees to pick it up. And while she’s there, she takes a look under the sagging weft of the sofa’s underside. She sees other things: coins, a safety-pin, a reel of cotton, a hair-clip that could be an old one of hers. She considers getting a ruler or a wooden spoon and hooking out all these things – she would if she were properly interested in keeping a nice house. But she isn’t. There are better things to do with your life. If only she could remember what they are.
She gets up and, as she does so, is aware of that sharp scorch of pain in the abdomen again. She wonders whether the time has come to ring Ted, to say, Ted, why is that scar there, what happened, tell me what happened because I can’t remember.
But now would not be a good time. He’ll be in his editing suite, his cave, as Elina thinks of it, removing and splicing the bad bits from films, making sure it all appears smooth and faultless, as if it was never any other way. And, anyway, it may all come back to her, she may remember on her own. He’s been under so much pressure recently, since this film overran, since the baby came, walking about with that drawn, pale face he gets when he’s either ill or stressed. She really shouldn’t worry him.
She goes instead to the window. The weather has still not let up. It has rained and rained for days, the sky blurred and swollen, the garden sodden. Around her, the house ticks to the rhythm of water: on roof tiles, on gutters, down drains.
Before, when she was still pregnant, the weather had been sunny. For weeks and weeks. Elina would sit in the shade of her studio with her feet in a bucket of cold water. In the morning she would do her yoga exercises out there, when the grass was still cool with dew. She ate grapefruit, sometimes three a day, she did sketches of some ants, but lazily, without any real intent, she watched the skin of her stomach ripple, move, like water before a storm. She read books about natural births. She wrote lists of names in charcoal on her studio walls.
Elina stands at the window, watching the rain. The man from down the street is walking along the pavement towards the Heath, his dog behind him. She cannot fathom, cannot grasp what happened to that person, that Elina of the charcoal lists, the ant sketches, the natural births, the buckets of cool water in the shade. How did she become this – a woman in stained pyjamas, standing weeping at a window, a woman frequently possessed by an urge to run through the streets, shouting, will somebody please help me, please?
Elina Vilkuna, she says to herself, is your name. That is who you are. She feels she must confine herself to known things, to facts. Then perhaps everything else will fall into place. There is her and there is the baby and there is Ted. Or that’s what everybody calls him – he has another, longer name but that one never gets used. Elina knows about Ted. She could recite his life to anyone who asked. She could sit an exam on Ted and pass with an A grade. He is her partner, boyfriend, other half, better half, lover, mate. When he leaves the house, he goes to his office. In Soho. He takes the Tube and sometimes he cycles. He is thirty-five, which is exactly four years older than her. He has hair the colour of conkers, size-ten feet, a liking for chicken Madras. One of his thumbs is flatter and longer than the other, the result of sucking it in childhood, he says. He has three fillings in his teeth, a white scar on his abdomen where his appendix was removed, a purplish mark on his left ankle from the sting of a jellyfish in the Indian Ocean years ago. He hates jazz, multiplex cinemas, swimming, dogs and cars – refuses to own one. He is allergic to horsehair and dried mango. These are the facts.
She finds she is sitting on the stairs, as if she is waiting for something or someone. It seems to be much later. Somewhere in the house she is aware of the phone ringing, the answerphone clicking on, and a friend of hers speaking into the silence. Elina will call her back. Later. Tomorrow. Some time. For now, her head is leaning against the wall, the baby is on her knee and beside her on the stair is a piece of blue cloth. Soft, fleecy material. Silver stars have been embroidered all over it.
Looking at these stars gives her an odd sensation. She is sure she has never seen them before and yet she can picture herself sewing them, the needle strung with silver, the sparkling thread led through and through the cloth. She knows the feel of the fleece, knows that a star near the hem is squashed slightly, and yet, and yet, she’s never seen it before. Has she? As she looks she is sure that she did this embroidery in the hospital, in between—
She looks down to the hallway. Sunshine is glowing through the twin glass panels of the front door. She stands, picking up the baby and the starry cloth or blanket, or whatever it is, it’s too small to be a blanket really, and descends the stairs. The light coming through the door is dazzling and she realises, with a leap in her chest, that it must have stopped raining.
She could, Elina realises, go out. What a thought. To go out into the streets, where the rain will be drying in patches from the roads and the leaves will have printed themselves on to the pavements. Out, where cars rev and turn, where dogs scratch themselves and sniff at the bases of lampposts, where pe
ople are walking, speaking, going about their lives. She, Elina, could walk to the end of the road. She could buy a paper, a pint of milk, a bar of chocolate, an orange, some pears.
She can imagine it so clearly, as if it’s only a week or two since she was out there, in the outside. How long has it been? How long is it since—
The problem is there is so much to remember. She’ll need, let’s see, her wallet, her keys. What else? Elina sees a calico bag on the floor of the hall and she crams into it the blue-star blanket, then some nappies and wipes. Surely that will do?
There is something else, though. Something tugs at her, insistent, something she knows she has forgotten. Elina stands for a moment, thinking. She has the baby, she has the pram, she has the bag. She looks up the stairs, she looks at the lozenges of light set into the front door, she looks down at herself. She has the baby in one arm and the bag slung over her shoulder, across her body, across her pyjamas.
Clothes. She needs something to wear.
In the bedroom she surveys the heap of clothes on her chair. She picks them up with her spare hand and drops them to the floor. A pair of jeans with an enormous waistband, some dungarees, grey jogging pants, a sweatshirt with a trailing flower design. She finds something green tangled up with something red and she can’t separate them with one hand so she gives them a shake, snaps them in the air, and a red scarf soars free, tossing out into the bedroom. Elina watches it as it falls in a graceful arc away from her, as it settles to the floor. She looks at it there, the red against the white carpet. She tilts her head one way, then the other, considering it. She looks back at the baby, who is making movements with his mouth, as if trying to communicate something to her. She doesn’t look at the scarf again but she thinks of it, the way it shot out like that into the air. She thinks that it somehow reminds her of something she has seen recently. And then she recalls what it is. Jets of blood. Beautiful, in their way. The pure, garnet brightness of them in the scrubbed white of the room. The way they would spin and resolve themselves into droplets as they travelled, before hurling themselves with definite, sure force against the fronts of the doctors, the nurses. The way they commanded such attention, the way they brought everyone running.
Elina drops the green smock and sits quickly on the chair. She is sure to keep a careful hold of the baby, of her son, and to keep looking at him, at nothing else, and she sees he is still mouthing secrets to her, as if he has all the answers to everything she needs to know.
Lexie stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down into the street. The old woman from the flat below is setting off on her daily walk. Dog lead in one hand, shopping-bag in the other, back bent into a comma under her coat, she inches, inches into the road, without looking left or right.
‘She’s going to get run over one day,’ Lexie murmurs.
‘Who?’ Innes says, from across the room, lifting his head from the mattress.
Lexie points with the tip of her cigarette. ‘Your neighbour. The one with a hunchback. And probably by you.’
She looks different from the girl who was reading on a tree stump. For one, she is naked, wearing only a candy-striped shirt of Innes’s, open down the front. For two, her hair has been cut in sloping, silken curtains about her face.
Innes yawns, stretches, turns on to his stomach. ‘Why would I want to run over my neighbour? And if you mean the old battleaxe from downstairs, it’s not a hunchback it’s a dowager’s hump. Known in the medical trade as thoracic spinal osteoporosis. Caused by—’
‘Oh, shush,’ Lexie says. ‘How do you know all these things anyway?’
Innes raises himself on to his elbow. ‘A misspent youth,’ he says. ‘Years squandered on books instead of on the likes of you.’
She smiles and exhales a stream of smoke, watching as the woman and her dog reach the pavement. It is a stifling, close day in October. The sky is heavy, threatening electric clashes, but the woman is dressed, as she always is, in a thick tweed coat. ‘Well,’ Lexie says, ‘you’ve made up for it since.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Innes twitches back a corner of the counterpane, ‘come here. Bring me your cigarette and your body.’
She doesn’t move. ‘In that order?’
‘In whichever order you damn well like. Come on!’ He slaps the mattress.
Lexie takes another pull on her cigarette. She scuffs her bare foot against the arch of its twin. She takes a last glance into the street, which is empty, then sets off, running, towards the bed. Halfway across the room, she leaves the ground in a balletic leap. Innes is saying, ‘Christ, woman,’ the striped shirt is flying out behind her, like wings, the cigarette is trailing white ash, and all she knows is that she is about to make love for the second time that day. She has no idea that she will die young, that she does not have as much time as she thinks. For now she has just discovered the love of her life, and death couldn’t be further from her mind.
She lands on the bed with a crash. Pillows and counterpane are tipped off, Innes seizes her by the wrist, the arm, the waist. ‘We won’t be needing this,’ he says, as he pulls off the shirt, as he flings it to the floor, as he manoeuvres her back on to the bed, as he shoulders his way between the V of her legs. He pauses for a moment to pluck the cigarette from her fingers, takes a drag, then stubs it out in an ashtray on the bedside table.
‘Right,’ he says, as he turns to her again.
But this is anticipating. The film needs to be rewound a little. Watch. Innes sucks in a nimbus of smoke, lifts a cigarette stub from the ashtray, appears to envelop Lexie in a shirt and push her across the room, the pillows jump on to the bed, Lexie zooms backwards towards the window. Then they are back on the bed and they are both naked and, goodness, doesn’t sex look oddly the same in reverse, except now they are lovingly putting on each other’s clothes, one by one, then whisking out of the door, running down the stairs, and Innes is pulling his key out of his door. The film speeds up. There are Innes and Lexie in his car, scooting backwards along a road, Lexie with a scarf over her head. There they are forking food out of their mouths in a restaurant and putting it down on the plates; here they are in bed again and then their clothes fly towards them. Here is a woman in a red pillbox hat walking in reverse away from Lexie. Here is Lexie again, looking up at a building in Soho, then she is walking away from it with a jerky, reversed gait. Lexie is walking backwards up a long, dim staircase. The film is getting faster and faster. A train pulls out of a big, smoke-filled station, rattles backwards through countryside. At a small station, Lexie is seen to get out and put down her suitcase. And the film ends. We are back, neatly, to where we left off.
Lexie’s mother gave her two pieces of advice when she left for London: 1. Get a secretarial job in a big, successful firm because that will ‘put you in the path of the right sort of man’. 2. Never be in the same room as a man and a bed.
Her father said: don’t waste your time with any more studying because it always makes women disagreeable.
Her younger siblings said: remember to visit the Queen.
Her aunt, who had spent some time in London in the 1920s, told her never to use the Underground (it was dirty and full of unsavoury types), never to go into coffee bars (they were full of germs), always to wear a girdle and carry an umbrella, and never to go to Soho.
Needless to say, she disregarded them all.
Lexie stood in the doorway, suitcase in hand. The bedsit was high among the eaves of a tall, thin terraced house; the ceiling, she saw, sloped towards itself at five different angles. The door, its frame, the skirting-boards, the boarded-up fireplace, the cupboard under the window were all painted yellow. Not a vibrant yellow – daffodil yellow, if you like – but a sickly, pale, dirty one. The yellow of old teeth, of pub ceilings. It was chipped off in places, revealing a gloomy brown underneath. This cheered Lexie in an odd way, the thought that someone had had to live there surrounded by an even worse colour.
She stepped further into the room and set down her case. The bed was
narrow and sagging, the headboard listing to one side. It was covered with an eiderdown of fading purple curlicues. When Lexie turned it down she saw the mattress was grey, stained, sagged in the middle. She twitched it back again quickly. She took off her coat and looked around for a peg on which to hang it. No peg. She draped it over the chair, which had also been painted, some time ago, a pale yellow but a slightly different shade from the skirting-boards. What was her landlady’s obsession with the colour?
The landlady, Mrs Collins, had met her at the door. A thin woman in a zipped housecoat and crescents of iridescent blue eyeshadow, her first question had been: ‘You’re not Italian, are you?’
Lexie, taken aback, had said no. Then she’d asked Mrs Collins what her objection was to Italians.
‘Can’t stand them,’ Mrs Collins grumbled, as she disappeared into the front room, leaving Lexie in the hall, staring at the brown, peeling wallpaper, the telephone on the wall, a list of house rules, ‘dirty so-and-sos. Here’s your keys.’ Mrs Collins reappeared in the hall and handed her two latchkeys. ‘One for the front door, one for your room. The usual rules apply.’ She gestured at the list on the pinboard. ‘No men, no pets, always use an ashtray, keep your room clean, no more than two visitors at a time, in by eleven every night or the door will be bolted.’ She leant in closer and scrutinised Lexie, breathing hard. ‘You may look like a nice, clean girl but you’re the sort that might turn. You’ve got that look about you.’