It’s dark out here, but there’s a glimmer of grey light somewhere low in the sky; it will be day soon and I must finish this. A mist of rain clings to my hair, to my arms and thighs. It makes me shiver but thankfully doesn’t disturb the soil. That stays in its perimeter pile. I have to lean right in to dig now. A long breath, pulled deep into my lungs, leaves me with the raw, wet taste of the bruised earth. My knees shift, nestled in the sodden ground, and the fabric of my trousers slowly draws moisture up my legs. Soil is caked on my hands and driven into my fingernails to the point of pain. Somewhere, somewhere, the other half of the compact hides. In front of me is a hole, a hole that I’ve been digging, in the middle of the green garden carpet. And suddenly I can’t think what I’m doing here, what it is I’m looking for. For a moment I’m too frightened to move, not knowing what I might do next. It could be anything: I might tear the flowers from their beds or chop down the trees, fill my mouth with leaves or bury myself, for Helen to dig up again.
Panic starts to seep from my stomach and my shoulder blades shudder together. The cold has got into my joints and I ache with it. Slowly I brush what dirt I can from my hands and, wiping them on the green carpet—the garden carpet, not moss, the other thing—I push myself steadily upright. And still I have the urge to go on digging, to search for something in the ground. But what can be here in my own garden? Unless it’s something I’ve planted. Have I put something here? And forgotten?
I sway on my feet, the grey, shadowless garden shimmering around me, but then a spark of pale gold drops over the trees in the distance. Dawn plummeting into the day. I press a foot against a mound of soil and work it into the hole, trampling the newly flat earth. It’s dawn and I’m out in the garden. And how lovely, really. How nice. To get some fresh air and watch the sun coming up. I’m shaking still as I walk back to the house, but there’s no need. I just came out to see the dawn and have a bit of air and some exercise. Nothing to worry about. And now I’ll go and do something I haven’t done for ages.
I’ll have a bath.
Inside, I run the taps, adding some sort of gloopy, flowery liquid, something Helen must have bought for me. I peel my trousers from my knees, the skin greyish after its dawn encounter with the wet earth, and take off the silky nightdress I have on top. I never sleep in this; I must have put it on especially. I wish I knew why—such a stupid thing to wear. I squeeze the fabric in my fist, listening to the muffled fizz of bubbles forming in the bath.
No, I think, perhaps it was a treat. A lovely silk nightie for a lovely golden morning. And why not? I drop it on to the floor and clamber carefully into the bath. I like being in the water. Old people aren’t supposed to have baths, we’re meant to shower while sitting on a little stool. But you can’t think when you’re having to balance on a bit of plastic with water gushing over your head. And I need to think.
My hands tremble as I reach for the cake, the slippery washing cake, but really I don’t know why, I’m having a lovely time, and anyway, I won’t mind so much once this dirt has come away. My mouth has that stale, grimy taste that makes me think of the time I spent ill in bed as a child, and I rub the edge of the washing cake against my lips. It’s wonderful getting clean again after you’ve been working hard. I wish I could remember what I was supposed to have been working hard at.
When I’m clean and dry I rummage in the wardrobe for one of Patrick’s old shirts. Helen wanted to take them all to wear when she’s gardening, but I kept a few. Some of them are very good, he had them specially made for him while he was working in Kuwait, and the material is soft and thick. It’s nice to be able to put one on, a reminder, a comfort. I can almost convince myself they still smell of him, though of course they’ve been washed many times between his death and now. This shirt is white with dove-grey stripes, the cotton cold at first. Too big for me, but that’s what’s nice. I tuck it into my trousers and button my cardigan over it before going downstairs. Carla has arrived and is making a pot of tea.
“Thank you, Polly,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to hear.
“The bath is filthy,” she says as I come into the kitchen. “And there’s a big lot of dirt on the lawn. What have you been doing?”
I wince at the question. Why is it I can remember the garden and the soil and the dew, but none of the reasons for being there? I work the sleeve of my cardigan down over my fingers, picturing the pale-gold sky, the sparkling grey of the leaves, colourless until the light hit them. I can see it all perfectly, I just can’t think when it was. One of those nights spent waiting for Sukey to come home? Some point in the past, anyway. I never wake up in time for the dawn now.
“Although it’s just as likely to be a son,” Carla says.
I’ve missed some earlier part of her speech, and I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“You’re lucky you have a daughter. They say sons steal from their old mothers. It was in a report I saw on the news.”
“But I do have a son,” I say.
“Millions of pounds, stolen every year.”
“I don’t have millions of pounds,” I say.
“And all kinds of antiques. Georgian, Victorian.”
“I don’t have any antiques, either.” Oh, this is no good. What sort of a conversation consists of people saying whether they have something or not? I stop listening, stop answering, but an image shimmers in the air, of bookcases and lamps and empty plant pots piled up at a window. Of deep-grained, solid furniture and dainty silver ornaments, of dark-glazed vases and plates made to look as if worms were wriggling across them. The sort of things Elizabeth is always looking for. They didn’t used to be so sought after, not when I was a girl and people sold them off for next to nothing. There were none of these dim, expensive shops or excitable TV programmes. The only place I ever saw real antiques was at Frank’s.
He had hundreds jumbled into his house, and they were always being moved so that just as you got used to swerving to avoid a chest of drawers it would disappear, to be replaced by a set of nesting tables put down exactly where you were likely to trip over them. Altogether, the house felt like some sort of nasty trick. A trap. Sukey didn’t like it either, and some of the things made her afraid, though she only admitted to that once.
I’d tripped over a revolving bookcase and bashed my knee on a grumpy-looking grandfather clock on my way to the sitting room. Sukey was curled up on a high-backed sofa, drawing a needle slowly through some delicate blueish material, strands of her hair catching on the sofa back, looking like creepers growing up a wall. Ma had sent me round with rags and darning wool, convinced that my sister wouldn’t be coping with all the housework, but Sukey never seemed to need much help, so I sat down by the fire and warmed one side of my face until it was burning hot.
Frank’s removal men were unloading a van in the yard, and they came through the sitting room on their way to the cellar, carrying boxes, spindly little tables, and heavy dining chairs. Sukey nodded at them as they emerged empty-handed, trying to rid their lungs of the dank cellar air.
“Old woman from the Avenue’s died,” she said. “So Frank’s bought more junk, much good it’ll do us. Though it might come in handy for firewood, I s’pose.”
She said the last bit loudly, and a soft-faced, sweating removal man stopped on his way to the cellar with one of the sharp-legged tables. “If that’s what you’re going to use it for, I’ll break it up now, save me a trip to yonder hell pit,” he said, putting the table down and leaning on it. Sukey smiled at her sewing, lifting one shoulder very carefully so as not to disturb the perfect line of stitches, and the man picked his table up again, chuckling to himself. She looked at me when he was gone.
“Oh, Mopps,” she said. “But just look on the mantelpiece. See what Frank’s keeping for himself from the house clearance. Ghoulish, I call it.”
Sukey often complained about the “junk” that Frank brought home. Paintings of boats all done in brownish paint, and ugly plates teeming with insects. This time it was a glass dome the size of a coal bucket full of stuffed birds. I got up, pressing a hand to the fiery side of my face, and peered in. The birds were brightly coloured, green and yellow and blue. Some had their wings spread out; some had beaks poking into flowers; others, as I moved round, pointed straight at me. Their glassy eyes seemed not to fit quite in their sockets, and their feathers had a dullness to them which made me think they’d been dyed. I couldn’t look away.
“Horrid, aren’t they? For some reason, Frank’s taken a liking to them and so we’re to have them here from now on. And, Mopps, no matter how many times I say to myself, ‘They’re stuffed and dead, Sukey, get a hold of yourself,’ I still can’t shake the idea that they’re going to fly out at me.” She pulled her row of stitches straight. “Silly, isn’t it?”
I looked at her and nodded, and that made her laugh.
“But I can just hear it, Mopps. The glass breaking and the blighters fluttering out, flapping their wings, coming to peck my eyes out.”
“Blimey, your missus has a mind on her,” one of the men said, coming into the room with Frank. They carried an old sofa between them. “You want to watch she doesn’t come up with too many ideas about you.”
“That’s just where I’m lucky, Alf,” Frank said. “She’s managed to get the idea into her head that I’m a catch. And I’m not complaining.”
They took the sofa into the cellar and Sukey watched them disappear down the steps before turning to me. “Get my shawl to cover those birds, will you?” she said. “I can joke all I like, but I really can’t bear to see them any longer.”
She looked quite desperate, and I went off to find the shawl which she thought she’d left on a chair in the kitchen, or on the coat stand in the hall, or possibly in the bedroom wardrobe, and if not there, then definitely on the towel rack in the bathroom. I walked through the kitchen, trying my hardest not to trip over or scrape my skin or knock my elbows, and had to hold the door open for two men carrying a large piece of furniture in from the yard. It was covered by a cloth, but I guessed it was a dressing table from the shape, with a mirror fixed to the top. The edges of the cloth rippled with the movement and made it seem as if the dressing table was floating between the men’s hands. One of them, a man with a face full of vertical lines, asked me to open the next door for them. I ran over to do it, but forgetting it opened outwards pulled instead of pushed, banging the door in its frame and making the plates on the nearest dresser clink together alarmingly. The men laughed.
“You ’aven’t quite got your sister’s delicate touch, ’ave you?” the line-faced one said.
They floated the furniture into the sitting room and I started up the stairs, stopping halfway and breathing quietly, listening to the house. There were creaks, deep and almost human, as if the house was straining under the weight of other people’s possessions. These were covered by the dissonant chiming of two clocks somewhere downstairs, and once I heard the cursing of a removal man as he walked into or fell over some piece of furniture. I hoped it was the line-faced one and looked out of the window.
There was no one in the yard now, and yet I could hear a faint rustling from outside, the sort of sound a blackbird makes when it’s foraging for worms under a hedge. A short, angry fizz of foliage followed by another. I couldn’t see anything, but the thicket near the lane bristled, and for some reason the sight of it made me shiver. There was no wind that day, and everything else was still, but I’d seen birds shake the hedgerows before, rearranging their wings inside them. Why should it frighten me now?
I carried on to the landing, nearly falling over an elephant-foot umbrella stand and squeezing through an army of old gramophones, their horns like summer squash flowers. None of these would play, but Frank kept them because if you stripped out the insides you could keep all sorts of things in them. Sukey told us that over dinner one evening, and Dad made muttered suggestions that the things wouldn’t be legal, guessing the contents based on the gifts Frank had given us: ham, nylons, marmalade, dried fruit, butter, eggs. The list had made Ma very cheerful indeed, though she’d been careful not to let Dad see.
Sukey’s shawl was on the towel rack, and as I pulled it free I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. I was surprised to meet myself here, and surprised by the way I looked. My face wasn’t the barrier I thought it was, it seemed so unguarded, so easy to read, so open to misinterpretation. My eyes were ringed with darkish circles before I ever lost an hour of sleep and my lips were red as if I’d been biting them in agitation. My nose was shiny, too. Sukey had promised to teach me to use powder several months before, and I reminded her as I went back into the sitting room.
“I don’t know, Mopps,” she said. “Perhaps you’re too young. Perhaps I shouldn’t have promised. Dad’ll probably have a fit.”
I was about to protest when I hit the peak of my ankle on a low tea table and I squealed instead, lifting my foot. The line-faced man came in and laughed.
“Clumsy one, you, eh?”