Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

TRAINS

In the town she came from it always felt like there were more people in the cemeteries than walking around the place on their own legs. The cemeteries were bigger than the parks in that town. High-speed trains crossed the flat countryside nearby in great bounds, Paris to Antwerp, Zurich to Brussels, but she never felt the trains contained living people either. They passed behind the lines of headstones, a blur of velocity, moving so fast it almost looked like they too were standing still.

But then one day she got on a train herself, and now it was the town that seemed to move. She sat next to her suitcase and stared out of the carriage window as it all moved away from her, the grey houses and rain-darkened streets, the concrete factory yards, the cemetery under the same low furrowed sky; moved away from her like a stranger who has passed her on the pavement and walked on, without recognition or regret.

She is scared. She thought in the new place she would feel free but she doesn’t. She feels tied by long tethers. When she makes the slightest movement, she feels it all along the length of her bonds.

The man collected her from the station. Welcome to England, he said, and then his talk ran away from her like a cataract going over a cliff. He wore young people’s clothes, a leather jacket, red sneakers on his feet. On the car journey she understood almost nothing of what he said. She sat rigid, frozen beside him. It was as if the car was full of noise, the sound of mad crashing and banging and shrieking, but he couldn’t hear it. She sat in her seat, frozen, glancing at him sometimes while he talked.

Out of the window she saw tilting streets of white houses, every street crowded with parked cars, and big birds picking at litter on the pavements. When she got out of the car she looked up. The sky was much further away than it was at home, and full of chasing clouds. She followed the man up the steps to the front door of a house and waited while he searched his pockets for his keys. The woman was standing in the hall. Sonia couldn’t see what she looked like because she instantly came forward, startling her, and kissed her on both cheeks. She took Sonia’s bag, the little handbag with the chain of square gold links, and put it on the hall table. She asked questions, tea, did Sonia want a cup of tea, and Sonia shook her head. Then she turned and went up the stairs, still talking. Sonia followed her. She opened the door to a room with a bed in it, a wardrobe, a desk, and Sonia went in. Then she said something and closed the door and went away.

Sonia stood there in her coat. She needed her handbag but it was downstairs. She wanted a cigarette. She went to the window and looked down. There was a little garden, flowers, a tree. There was a knock at the door and the man came in with her suitcase. He put it down beside the bed and went away again. She stood in her coat and waited.

‘How is it?’ Kurt said on the phone. ‘What’s it like? How is the house?’

‘Big,’ she said.

‘Did you give them their gifts?’

Kurt helped her choose the gifts. The only place to buy things was the general store, where they sold newspapers and cigarettes and food that could stand on the shelves for a year without rotting. They chose key rings for the children, one each, and for the parents a jar of some pickle Kurt said was the right thing to offer no matter what it tasted like, because it was a speciality of the region.

‘Of course I did,’ she said.

‘And the children? How are they?’

She hadn’t really paid much attention to the children. She felt like a child herself. During dinner she couldn’t eat or speak. They sat around the table, the father and the mother, the two children and her. They felt, the two girls, a little like rivals; dimly she saw them across the table, two beings competing with her for the evening’s resources, almost for consciousness itself. Something was happening to her, to her, yet everyone seemed to think something was happening to them too. The woman kept petting the younger girl and putting her on her lap. When they had finished eating the woman got up to clear the plates. Sonia hesitated and then she got up too and began carrying things to the sink. The woman seemed pleased. Oh thank you, she said.

‘They’re OK,’ she said to Kurt. She told him she had helped with the dishes.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Remember you’re there to help. You’ll get used to being there. It’s difficult at first. Everything will seem strange. You’ll feel homesick.’

She did not say, did not say that what sickened her was, in fact, the thought of home. The paralysing terror she felt was the opposite of homesickness. It came from her sense that there might be nothing else for her, that she had come out into the world and met its strangeness and indifference like a fist in her face.

‘It will all seem better tomorrow,’ Kurt said. ‘I’ll call you again in the evening on my break, same time.’

Kurt was working for the summer in a chicken factory. He worked nights because the pay was better. On his part of the line they took out the chicken’s insides, sealed them in a little plastic bag to preserve them, and put them back in the chicken again. Like education, Sonia said. She lay on her bed, darkness at the window, the metal phone hot against her ear. She had failed her English certificate and couldn’t complete her college course without it: it was Kurt’s suggestion, to defer her place and come here. You can live for free, he said. You live with a family, you help them around the house, and you come back speaking English. She didn’t say: if I spoke English I wouldn’t come back at all.

‘All right,’ she said. She didn’t ask him anything about himself. She had two pills in her purse she was going to take in a minute, to make her sleep. ‘Bye.’

The house is big. There are rooms with no one in them, full of paintings and old furniture like a museum. She looks through the doorways but doesn’t go in. She goes downstairs and straight out to the garden, to smoke.

Later she leaves the house and walks around the town. The woman has taken the children to school. She says one day Sonia can take them, but for now she’ll do it herself. Sonia understands better when the woman speaks than the man. Yet the woman talks about things that don’t exist. There’s something that comes from her, something other than words. It’s as if she isn’t contained in her own skin. She spills out and Sonia can see the spillage. She can see what is meant as well as hear it. The woman talks about the future and the past but what she wants right now isn’t obvious. So Sonia goes out and walks around.

In the town centre there are so many shops they make a kind of noise. There’s a feeling of crisis, almost of panic here: the plate-glass doors stand open, loud music plays, the pavements are swarming with people. The shops are huge inside, like caves, and she stands at their mouths, being shoved by passersby. She watches the customers moving around the aisles, rifling and discarding with the unselfconsciousness of looters. There are long queues at the tills. She doesn’t know whether what she is seeing is poverty or luxury.

She goes to look at the sea. The beach is quieter. There are people walking their dogs. The water is grey and fretted by wind. She sits on the shingle, smoking. A man approaches her, a young skinny man in black trousers and a black T-shirt with a picture of a wolf on it. He asks her for a cigarette. They talk for a while. She is surprised that when she says English words they work and he understands. He sits quite close to her on the shingle and stares into her face while she talks. He seems to be interested in her: the feeling is uncomfortable, like a needle probing at a vein. His face is pale; his eyes are green, with long black lashes. She tells him a bit about her family, her home town. Then he mentions that he comes from Lithuania and immediately she wants to get up and leave. She thought he was English, but now she knows his interest is the interest of a lost boy, someone alone who saw her aloneness as if it had been written across her face.

On the way home she passes a little shop hidden in a side street whose window is all decorated with strange pictures, brooding flowers with black outlines, roses shedding drops of blood, daggers with snakes twined around their blades. It is a tattoo parlour. She stands for a long time looking at the window. Then she goes back to the house.

Sonia, the woman says, I really need you. Sonia understands that part of the sentence: the words are the words of the American song they play in the bars at home. The rest is harder to make sense of. The woman wants her to go shopping. She writes a list. She draws a map, with a big cross on it for the supermarket. She gives her money, large notes with a thread of silver running through them.

Sonia spends a long time in the supermarket. The supermarket is nice: she feels happy there. She looks at the food. She wanders the aisles, caressing things. At home she does the shopping for her mother. The supermarket is a long way from her mother’s house and she has to bring the bags back on the bus. She carries the bags into the kitchen, where her mother and her mother’s boyfriend are usually sitting smoking and drinking coffee. They don’t thank her; they barely even look at her.

But the woman thanks her. She seems overjoyed. Well done, she says. Well done. Did you get lost? She taps the watch on her wrist, shows the time to Sonia. Sonia has been away for three hours. I was worried, the woman says. I was worried you’d got lost.

She goes to her room and lies on the bed. She bought a package of brownies at the supermarket and she eats them lying there. There are so many that she can eat them without worrying the pleasure will come to an end, but all at once it does and the package is empty. It starts to get dark. She doesn’t turn on the lights. She feels sleepy. She lies there, drifting, in her clothes. When the knock at the door comes she is startled; she must have fallen asleep. The woman calls her name through the door. Sonia gets up, her head thick. Yes? she says through the door. The English word comes so strangely from her mouth. The woman asks her if she can come downstairs. I need you, she says.

The two little girls don’t talk to her and she doesn’t talk to them either. She sits on a chair in the corner while they do whatever it is they do. She reads a magazine. When they fight it is harder to concentrate on reading. The magazine is in English. The words are like little pieces of grit in her eyes.

The woman keeps coming into the room and going out again. She seems to be looking for something. There are frown lines on her face. The children put out their arms as she passes, like drowning people. Sonia, she says. Sonia.

In the evening she hears the man and the woman talking. Their conversation never stops. She wonders how they could possibly have so much to say to one another. And in English, too — she knows that isn’t a problem for them, but it makes her feel tired. She has started to take three pills at night instead of two. All day she is exhausted and then at night she is flung about in a whirling kind of chaos, all the lights on in her head, spinning and spinning in the splintered darkness. Kurt says her mind is having trouble processing all this new information. He says it will pass. He asks if she’s thinking in English yet.

The woman isn’t pleased with her any more.

Sonia, she says, we need to have a talk.

Maybe later, Sonia says.

It is first thing in the morning and her head is so stuffy with pills she can barely see the coffee grains she is trying to spoon into her cup.

I’m taking the children to school, the woman says. There is the sound of broken glass in her voice. When I come back I want to talk.

Sonia sits at the kitchen table in her pyjamas, waiting. She has found an over-sized cup in one of the cupboards and that is what she makes her coffee in. It is as big as a bowl. She fills it right to the top, the hot milk frothy and sweet, just a few coffee grains stirred in. It takes her a long time to drink it. Sometimes, when she’s finished, she makes another one and takes it back to the table. The kitchen is a nice room and she likes to sit here, drinking coffee. A whole morning can pass like that.

The woman returns. She is frowning. She says, you have to get dressed in the mornings. You have to get up and dressed.

I’m tired, Sonia says.

I want you up and dressed and downstairs by eight o’clock in the morning, she says. I want you to help me.

Sonia says nothing.

You need to make friends with the children, she says. It’s not up to them. It’s up to you.

Sonia says nothing.

I want you to cook, the woman says. I want you to cook dinner. I want you to do the laundry. I want you to tidy up around here.

Sonia stares at her. Her eyes feel very wide open. She can’t close them or look away.

You need to do these things, the woman says, or you’re going to have to go home.

The man goes away. The woman says he will be gone for a week. In the evening Sonia sees her through a crack in the sitting-room door. She sits alone, smoking and staring into space.

Sonia takes four pills and in the morning is woken by the sound of banging on her bedroom door. She is too far away to answer. She can hear gulls screaming somewhere outside. She drifts back into a black-edged sleep. Later, the banging starts again.

Yes, she says hoarsely.

Get up, the woman says through the door. Get up now. Downstairs Sonia finds her in the kitchen, washing the floor with a mop. She plunges the mop in the bucket and bangs it against the floor. She chases it into the corners. She is all hard angles and frowning lines. For the first time since she came here Sonia sees something she recognises: anger.

What’s wrong with you? the woman says. Why can’t you get up? Pills. I take some pills, Sonia says.

What pills?

From the doctor. They make me tired.

What are they for? Why does the doctor give you pills?

I stayed in hospital, Sonia says. It was a long time ago.

Why were you in hospital?

Sonia stares at her wide-eyed. She feels suddenly soft, against this hard anger. She feels relieved.

I hurt myself, she says.

On purpose?

Sonia is silent. She wants to smile, to laugh, to dance, but she feels so beautifully soft that all she can do is yield. She gives a little nod.

How long were you there for? In the hospital?

One year, Sonia says. My sixteen year.

OK, the woman says, shaking her head. OK.

The man had entered her compartment on the train. She was going away to boarding school because her mother said she couldn’t be at home any more. At this school you slept and ate your meals, and that was where she was going. The man talked to her while darkness fell outside the windows of the speeding carriage, wadding the flat wastes like a kind of black fog through which the spectral forms of darkened factories sometimes loomed and then vanished. He reminded her of her father, with his steel-framed glasses and his hair with bits of grey in it. He locked the carriage door and he took her long ponytail in his hand and twisted it through his fingers. Then he yanked it so hard she thought her neck would break.

I should have been told this, the woman says. Her arms are folded tight against her chest. She stares out of the window at the garden. Don’t you think I should have been told this?

The man went to prison eventually. Her mother said it was a terrible thing, to ruin a man’s life. She said Sonia must have provoked him. So one evening Sonia cut her wrists, and her arms too for good measure. She was put in a psychiatric hospital: that was where she met Kurt.

I’m going to have to phone the agency, the woman says. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to go home.

I can’t go home, Sonia says. I have nowhere to go.

I’m sorry, the woman says again. She looks at her watch. God, I’m late, she says. I’ve got to pick up the children and I’m going to be late.

She rushes away and Sonia hears the front door close. After a while she goes outside to smoke a cigarette. The sky is iron-grey and heavy. A gust of wind makes the door to the kitchen slam. While she smokes a kind of darkness seems to gather over the garden, to tower over it, growing and leaning like a black cliff. She puts out her cigarette. The rain comes hard and fast. It’s only a few paces back to the house from the garden but by the time she gets in she is wet.

A little while later she hears the front door open, the sounds of footsteps and voices in the hall. Sonia comes out of her room. The woman stands in the hall with the two children. Water drips from them on to the hall floor. The woman wears only a T-shirt: it is so wet that Sonia can see her skin through it. She sees that the younger child is wearing the woman’s coat; the older one has her umbrella. Water runs from the woman’s hair. She is shaking so violently that Sonia can hear her teeth knocking together. She tries to speak.

I, she says. I.

Then, very slowly, her body racked by tremors, she begins to climb the stairs, leaving a trail of water behind her. She passes Sonia without speaking on the landing. The children are still standing, staring up at her, in the hall. She goes into her bedroom and closes the door.

Sonia makes the noodles in cream sauce that her grandmother used to make for her when she was small. Her grandmother lived in a big house in the countryside and Sonia would spend the school holidays there. Sonia loved her grandmother. She puts lots of grated cheese on top of the noodles. She is frightened they won’t like it but the children eat it all.

The woman does not come down. After dinner Sonia goes up and knocks at her door. There is no reply. After a while she opens the door a little. The woman is lying in bed, asleep. Her tangled hair spread over the pillow is still damp. Sonia takes the children upstairs and runs the bath for them. She finds their pyjamas in their rooms. When they try to go into their mother’s room she stops them. Mummy’s sleeping, she says. At midnight she looks in again. The woman is exactly as she was, sleeping, except that the covers are pushed back. She is still wearing the clothes she got wet in.

Sonia sets the alarm on her phone to wake her up in the morning. She is about to take her pills and then she doesn’t. Before breakfast, when she looks in, the woman’s eyes are open. The whites are yellow. She tries to speak. Water, she says. Sonia gets a jug of water and a glass and puts them beside her bed. The woman gets up on her elbow to drink. The glass shakes violently in her hand and the water spills. She falls back against the pillows. She tries to say something but her eyes keep closing. Sonia goes downstairs, where the children are waiting for her. The younger one asks her to brush her hair. Sonia brushes it and then she braids it smoothly into a high plait. The little girl goes to look at herself in the mirror and when she comes back she seems pleased.

They show her the way to school. At the gate Sonia isn’t sure what to do. Then she gives each of them an awkward little hug and they run off into the playground.

The man calls. Sonia tells him the woman is ill. Oh dear, he says. He asks her if she can manage on her own. Of course, she says. That’s great, he says. It’s difficult for me to come back. That’s a real help.

The woman lies in bed for hour after hour. Sometimes she can speak and sometimes she can’t. The children, she says. Occasionally Sonia notices that the bed is completely soaked. The woman has a fever. Sonia brings her water. Kurt calls and she describes the woman’s symptoms. Pneumonia, he says confidently. When the children return from school they ask to see her. She replies that Mummy’s ill and needs to be left alone. She makes gingerbread for them, with a special cream-cheese icing. They want to stir the mixture and she lets them. The next day, when they are at school, she walks around the town. She goes to the supermarket and chooses what she likes. She goes to the shops and looks at the clothes. She passes the tattoo parlour. She stands outside it, looking at the pictures on the windows. Then, after a while, she opens the door and goes in.

The man behind the counter is reading a newspaper. He has big hoops in his ears. She stares at them so as not to stare at the rest of him. His skin is like jungle, like ivy. The patterns swarm all the way up his throat. He shows her pictures in a book. He says, once you’ve done this you can’t change your mind, you know that don’t you? She chooses a rose, just one. Where? he says. She bares her shoulder. She is careful not to let her sleeves slip down. She doesn’t want him to see the scars on her arms. While he works he talks but she doesn’t understand what he says. He doesn’t hurt her much.

She buys a book for the little girls, a children’s book in her own language. She teaches them a few words. She points at things and says the name in her own tongue, and they repeat after her. When she goes in to give the woman her water, she finds her sitting up in bed for the first time. Her face is bloodless and white. Her hair is matted. The room has a strange smell.

Where are the children, she says.

With me, Sonia says. They are with me.

Tell them to come up, she says. I want to see them.

Maybe later, Sonia says. We are cooking just now. You need to rest.

The man is coming back. She has cleaned the house. She has made everything look nice. She is cooking a special meal, mushrooms in cream sauce, fried onions, potatoes with melted cheese, and the children are helping her cook. The younger girl hurts her finger on the metal grater when she is grating the cheese for Sonia. She cries. She says she wants to see her mother. The sobs go through her in big shudders. Sonia finds her a plaster and wraps it around the finger. She gives her a piece of gingerbread. She takes her on her lap, as she has seen the woman do, and to her surprise the little girl lets her.

Well done, the man says when he comes back. He looks around at the tidy house, at the kitchen full of good smells. Well done. I don’t know what we’d have done without you.

He hugs the children. He goes up to see the woman but soon comes back down again. He says she is asleep. He says he is starving hungry. They sit around the table, the four of them, eating her food. Just as they are finishing a sound comes from upstairs. It is the sound of footsteps. The footsteps are slow; sometimes they stop and then start again. After a while the woman appears in the doorway. She is wearing a crumpled nightdress. Her hair stands up in a shock. Her lips are a bluish colour. She is very white, and much thinner than she was before. She puts her hand against the doorway for support. She looks at them all sitting there. She tries to smile.

Hello, she says.

Sonia doesn’t speak to Kurt so much any more. When he calls, she sees the number flashing and decides not to answer. She is too busy to talk to him. She has made some new friends and often in the evenings they go out. They go to bars and clubs; they go dancing. Sonia has bought a new top, backless, to show off her tattoo. People compliment her on it so often that she goes back to the tattoo parlour and gets another one, a long flowering bramble that twists all the way down her spine.

She takes the children to school in the mornings and in the afternoon she picks them up again. On the way they hold her hands. They sit in the kitchen making things, pumpkin cupcakes, strudel, the things she used to make with her grandmother. She had forgotten these things until now. When Christmas comes she makes a felt calendar with them, like the ones she used to have. She sews the pockets, one for each day, and puts a chocolate in each one. The children help her hang it on the wall. Look, they say to the man. Look what Sonia made us. Well done Sonia, he says. Well done.

The woman stays in her room. Sometimes she comes and stands in the kitchen doorway. She doesn’t seem to know what to do. She looks at Sonia and the children and she goes away again. These days it is the man Sonia takes her orders from. He writes the shopping lists. He teaches her to cook some English dishes. She understands that her food is too heavy; she learns to cook things that are more refined. One day he asks her what she is doing and she tells him she is making the herb marinade for the chicken. He laughs. You’re a fast learner, he says. He tells her how much her English has improved. He corrects her mistakes.

At Christmas they buy her a present, a white woollen coat that buttons up tight around her body. She has given them a large stollen she baked herself. She phoned up her grandmother and asked for the recipe. When they unwrapped it they all clapped and exclaimed. She has never worn anything like the white coat before. They watch her try it on. The woman says, it looks lovely Sonia. She is sitting in the corner, biting her nails. Sonia can tell from the expression on her face that the woman chose the coat herself. She thanks her. Later she puts it in a bag under her bed, and pushes it as far into the darkness as she can.

The man has moved into a different bedroom. Sonia sees his things there when she goes in to clean. The woman spends all her time in the room they used to share. She comes down at mealtimes and sits silently at the table. She doesn’t eat the food Sonia has cooked.

Things are a bit difficult at the moment, the man tells her. You’re being a real help. Well done.

Sometimes she hears them shouting at each other. They stay up until late at night. During the day she hears the woman crying in her room. In the evenings, when they’ve finally gone to bed, Sonia goes down to the kitchen to eat cereal. Her body has started to crave starch. The food they eat is all protein, and she misses the comforting feeling of blandness filling her mouth. Sometimes she will eat a whole box, saturating the bowl to the top with milk. Where’s all the milk gone? the woman will say, angrily, in the morning.

One evening she finds the woman in the kitchen alone. She is smoking and staring out of the window. Oh hello Sonia, she says.

Can I smoke too? Sonia says.

Go ahead, the woman says, waving her hand to show that she doesn’t care.

They sit there and smoke in silence. Then the woman starts to ask her about her family. She asks about her father, her mother, about where they live.

My parents divorced, Sonia says. They live far apart from each other.

How old were you? the woman asks.

Ten I think, Sonia says.

And who did you live with? the woman says. Your mother or your father?

I wanted to live with my father, Sonia says. But his new wife didn’t like it.

What about your mother? the woman says.

She didn’t want me there. She doesn’t like me. I stayed a lot of the time with my grandmother. My mother doesn’t like my grandmother either. She ran away from home when she was sixteen. She ran away with my father.

The woman raises her eyebrows. She has a stricken expression on her face. How old was your mother when you were born? she says.

She was already pregnant with me when she ran away, Sonia says. She was sixteen.

So she’s the same age now as me, the woman says.

Younger than you, Sonia says.

I want to say, the woman says after a pause, I want to say that I’m sorry these things have happened to you. I’m really sorry.

Sonia gazes at her. Her head swims with a warm liquid feeling. She feels soft suddenly, soft as dough.

Someone should apologise to you, the woman says. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m saying sorry.

She gets up and before she leaves the room she comes and gives Sonia a hug. Her body is hard and bony. Sonia can still feel the imprint of it on her own soft flesh long after she’s gone.

The man says, Sonia I need you.

He is packing his things. He wants her to help him. He tells her what to do. She fills boxes and folds clothes neatly into suitcases. She smoothes her hands over the folded shirts and aligns the tightly paired socks.

In the evening Kurt calls.

At last I’ve saved the money for a ticket, he says. I’m coming to visit you.

She thinks about it.

Let’s meet in London, she says. I want to see Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. I want to go to some clubs.

OK, Kurt says admiringly. It’s easier for me, anyhow.

I know somewhere cheap we can stay, she says.

They stay in a hostel in Leicester Square, the two of them crammed into a single bed. She and Kurt have never made love. He has never asked her to. They stay out at a club all night and then sleep all day.

My next job will be in London, Sonia says. London is a great city.

He asks about the family she lives with.

They’re great, she says.

And the children?

The children are really cute, she says.

She shows him pictures she’s taken of them on her phone.

When she gets back the man has gone. His room is empty. It is raining outside; she watches the rain for a while through the windows of his empty room. Later he phones her and asks her to bring the children round to his new house after school. She cooks dinner for them all in the unfamiliar kitchen. She goes back to the other house to sleep: there isn’t enough room for her to sleep at the man’s house. She doesn’t see the woman, though she hears her walking around during the night.

The next day she takes the children to the man’s new house again. Towards evening the woman rings the bell. The older girl goes to let her in. Sonia and the man are sitting around the table having dinner. The younger girl is sitting on Sonia’s lap. Sonia has plaited her hair.

The woman comes in and stares at them. She looks at Sonia. Her face is shocked. She and the man go off somewhere to talk. Then she goes away again, taking the children with her. Before they go, they hug Sonia. They cling to her. Be good girls, she says to them. Go with your mummy.

She and the man are left alone. She clears the dishes and tidies up. Eventually he tells her she can go. I don’t need you for anything else, he says.

At home, the woman is waiting for her in the hall.

I want you to leave, she says. You can’t stay here any more.

Sonia looks at her with wide-open eyes.

There’s no job for you any more, the woman says. I’m sorry.

Sonia has trouble recognising the woman’s power to make this decision. Surely it’s up to the man too?

There’s no job for you there either, the woman says. Then she adds, We have to do this ourselves.

Sonia thinks she will find out about that in private. She has the man’s number on her mobile phone. He calls her all the time with instructions. He needs her.

Believe me, the woman says. Believe me, that isn’t going to work.

The woman looks terrible. She is so thin she looks like a skeleton. One side of her face is swollen and she keeps her hand there, holding it over her cheek.

They pulled out my tooth, she says. It still hurts where they pulled it out.

Where will I go? Sonia says.

The woman swallows, closes her eyes, presses her hand to her cheek.

I’ve found you a job with another family, she says. In London.

For a moment a kind of chasm seems to open up beside her, disclosing a vast grey cityscape where the walls of the house ought to be. Sonia is frightened. She wants to run to her room and lock herself inside. She wants to crawl under the bed and hide there.

No, she says. No I don’t want.

She can’t speak. They stand there face to face in the electric light of the hall. The woman’s face is anguished, ugly. She stands at the foot of the stairs, as though barring Sonia’s way up. She is expelling her.

It’s all right, the woman says then, taking her hand from her cheek and resting it on Sonia’s arm. It’s my sister’s family. You met her once, remember? She knows all about you. She’s happy to have you. It’s the least we can do, she says, and she closes her eyes again.

London is great. London is a great city. At the new place Sonia has her own separate flat on the lower floor of the family’s house. She joins a gym. She’s out almost every night. There are four children here instead of two, but there is less work because the new woman likes to do most things for them herself.

At Christmas she thinks of the old family. Something makes her think of them. It is winter now, and darkness falls at four o’clock. Sonia walks in her new coat, a fake fur she bought for herself on Oxford Street. She is walking home through the residential streets of her neighbourhood. It is a wealthy neighbourhood, all family houses with clipped hedges and neat front gardens. The lights are on inside and as she passes she looks through the windows, looks at the people in their warm bright rooms. And she remembers then how she left the old house; how the woman had called her a taxi to the train station, how they said goodbye on the front step. The woman went back inside and closed the door. Sonia carried her suitcase alone to the taxi, but before she got in she looked back, back at the house whose windows were all dark; and she saw, dimly, the shape of the woman inside, saw her sitting there alone in the darkness.

When she gets home she finds her grandmother’s recipe and she makes a big stollen in the kitchenette of her flat. It takes her all evening and half the night. The little room gets so hot she has to open the windows and let the freezing air in. She takes off her sweater and works in her vest, her arms bare. When it’s cooked and cooled she takes a long sharp knife and she cuts it carefully into two equal pieces, and she wraps each piece in muslin and then in foil and then in bright Christmas paper, and she puts the pieces in two boxes to post in the morning, one to the man and one to the woman.