The Whole World

CHAPTER 8

“The river was low today,” Harry said. He slipped in beside me under the duvet, which puffed the scent of an aggressively floral detergent as it settled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His hollow in the mattress blended with mine. A tiny bead of birdseed rolled up against my thigh.

“They dredged the Cam. They didn’t find anything,” he explained.

Anything. A body. They hadn’t found a body. “I wouldn’t expect them to.”

“Why? Where is he? A drowning would make as much sense as anything else-”

“It would make no sense whatever. Why are you telling me this?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “I thought you’d want to know.” He opened the book so hard that its spine cracked. I winced. “I thought you’d want to know if he was dead.”

“But you don’t know if he’s dead. You only know he’s not drowned.”

“Yes, he’s not drowned! Good news, I thought.”

“I never thought he was drowned in the first place.”

Was that a sunflower seed? I kicked my legs and brushed at the sheet under my knees.

“What?” he asked.

I threw back the duvet and sat up, legs over the side. There was no explaining it to him. He was inured to the hard little specks all over the house.

He put his hand between my shoulder blades and rubbed.

“Would you please just read the book,” I finally said.

“No.” Both of his hands were on my shoulders now. The book slid off his lap and a corner of it poked me.

“No,” I said too.

He dropped his hands. He slapped the book onto his nightstand.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake. “Don’t pout,” I said.

“I’m going to sleep.”

I brought my legs back up onto the bed. I leaned across to his side. “Please.”

I hadn’t told him why the books mattered. He only knew that one of my avenues of research for the biography had been to track the effect of Linda Paul’s series character, Susan Maud Madison. Homage to her, with her three names, was obvious to spot. I’d written to several women of that name, to find out whether they’d been given it on purpose, and what it was their mothers had wished for them by doing so.

One of those, S. M. Madison, was a writer. Not famous, but reliably mid-list. This was one of S. M. Madison’s books. It wasn’t available in audio.

“Please, Harry,” I said again. I tried to wheedle with my voice, but I’ve never been much good at that.

“Gretchen,” he said, “it’s late.”

“No.” It’s not too late. That’s what I was discovering: It wasn’t too late.

The dust jacket crinkled as he opened it.

He read aloud with a fervour more suited to an undergraduate auditioning for a drama society. It was useless to direct him otherwise. I filtered out his tone and emphases to get at the words, the raw words:

“‘Gloria was swarmed by children: hot, fat, sticky ones, that had been eating with their fingers and clawing into garden soil. They nuzzled at every bend of her body: one in the crook of her arm, another behind the knees, a small neck slipped into the narrow of her waist. She put her fingers through the hair of that one, the one at her hip. They all breathed on her. It was overwhelming. This happened every afternoon, at the end of their trek home from school-’ Good God, that’s unpleasant.”

I tensed. “Please don’t comment.” It wrenched me out of the story.

He sighed.

This is exactly why I’d had to hire a student to work with the photographs.

He read on. A later scene put the protagonist on her front steps, while her neighbour, Gloria, was out.

“‘Lily, the smallest one, came to me when her mother didn’t answer the door. She wanted a drink. I denied having water, which made her laugh. The sound was frail and breathy and high; her fragility terrified me. Where was Gloria? Lily ran off; she grabbed a branch and swung herself up onto it. Where was her mother? I didn’t want to be responsible for this. These small creatures, so fast and so needy. So empty all the time. They consume the adults around them. That’s how they become adults themselves. They eat their parents up.’”

He stopped. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “For God’s sake, get on with it!” But I had gripped the duvet tightly in my fists. I let it go and smoothed it out.

I’d already listened to others of her books that were more current. This one was her first. It was the only one of them that had a mother in it, any mother at all.

I suddenly remembered myself as a child, lying half-asleep on a kind of sofa bed, pressed against a warm female body: leftover perfume, a brushed cotton nightgown over free breasts. We were asleep together, and suddenly the light flashed on. It woke me; I can still see very bright light even today. Clicking heels against the wood floor, a vaporous smell of drink. I clambered out from under the smooth sheet and itchy blanket to fling myself at the woman who’d just walked in the door. I reached up as high as I could, so high I felt the beads in her necklace. I was between her and a man. The purse hanging off her wrist was at just the height to bounce hard into my head.

Behind me, the cotton sleeves pulled me back. That’s all I remember, being sucked into a suffocation of warm brushed cotton, under a cool sheet and itchy blanket. The woman in beads with the handbag walked through to the bedroom. I don’t know what happened to the man.

That was Linda Paul, my mother. The woman in the nightgown was my nanny. She raised me. She raised me when she was with Linda, and then she raised me without her.

Nick had discovered that my recently deceased mother wasn’t Linda Paul, and assumed that Linda Paul had never been my mother at all. But I knew, from research, that she had two relatives blind in the same way that I am. I was certain that Linda Paul had given birth to me.

Then she had given me away.

Nick hadn’t realised that’s what he’d shown me. I’d had to make him stop before he got that far himself. There’s a difference between a noise downstairs in the night and someone suddenly standing over your bed. They may amount to the same thing, they may both be the same intruder, but the moment it might be and the moment it undeniably is are different.

I didn’t notice that Nick had gone, truly gone, until the police came to talk to me. I was angry. This wasn’t my fault. What had he done to himself? I told the Inspector that he’d informally assisted with a research project; that was all. That he seemed to be a generally untroubled person. The Inspector asked me if I was worried about him. What kind of question is that? What would my answer matter in the investigation? I didn’t know if I was. Polly and her mother disturbed me more.

Most distracting of all, I knew who S. M. Madison must be. After Linda Paul abandoned me, where did she go? She wouldn’t stop writing, would she? She wouldn’t. That fantasy of sacrifice came from the nanny, a woman who’d never written anything. S. M. Madison had written a book every two years since 1963.

So I’ve known since the day Nick was gone.

I didn’t tell anyone, not even Harry. I didn’t know what he’d do if I did. He might try to protect me. He might close the book permanently. I couldn’t let him do that.

“Harry,” I said, truly begging, “please read it to me.” Unthinkingly, I rested my hand on his forearm. A static charge jolted us both, reminding me how long it had been since I’d touched him. “Please,” I said again. I meant it desperately.

So Harry read on.

In the end, Gloria died. The children moved. I’d made Harry read the entire book, every word, one by one. A review on the back of the jacket congratulated S. M. Madison’s bravery and originality in depicting an alternative to the self-sacrificing mother figure that society has colluded to perpetuate. Suddenly I, one of the first female Fellows at Magdalene and the first blind graduate of my college, was put on the defensive as a party to woman-stifling, antifeminist society. My eagerness to accept the fantasy concocted by the one who raised me, to see myself and the mothering of me as more valuable than anything else she might have done, made me an accomplice. Some feminists think men are the enemy, but I knew myself for what I was. Children are the enemy here. It’s not men who demand a woman’s undivided attention, it’s children. It’s the children who wake her up, and the children who come to her for everything, every little thing. It’s the children who can’t dress themselves or feed themselves or go on without her attention and approval. My anger was tempered into pity for my mother, and guilt. What had I done to her? What had my existence done?

Harry’s voice was parched. He asked me again, “Are you all right?”

Why couldn’t he stop that? What was wrong with the man?

“I’m going to sleep,” I said. I rolled onto my side. I didn’t hear the click of a switch, so he must have stayed up. He had books of his own to read.

Harry would have thought I’d gone out.

The next morning, I woke before he did, dressed, and drank my coffee at the kitchen table.

There was the scrape and thud of a magazine being thrust through our mail slot. I wanted to catch Lawrence, our postman, to hand him a card I needed mailed. Today was Richard’s wedding, and I had yet to post it.

We have a cluster of bells attached to our front door. I made those bells shake.

But it wasn’t Lawrence at the door. Of course not. It being Richard’s wedding, it was Sunday. The magazine-person was someone who smelled of cosmetics. That, and finding myself standing on a pile of yesterday’s mail, disoriented me. “I’m sorry,” I said, stepping back and bending to retrieve the mail from the floor. Both Harry and I must have used only the side door yesterday.

The magazine-person’s voice confirmed her gender. “So sorry to have disturbed you,” she said. “I’m an estate agent. Rebecca Phillips-Koster. I’m selling the house across the road.” She crouched with me. “I was just delivering these informational brochures around the neighbourhood.”

I assumed she was proffering one, but my hands were full of yesterday’s mail. She twigged soon enough that I don’t see, and compensated with a flourish of attempted assistance. She pulled at the letters in my hands, to aggregate them with her magazine. I was shocked enough that I let go. She layered them all into a neat pyramid, smallest mail on top, and returned the stack to me. We stood. “Shall I tell you who they’re from?” she asked loudly.

The pipes in the wall rattled; Harry was showering. He would only have heard the shaken bells on the door, not the obtuse Ms. Phillips-Koster exaggerating her pronunciation for my sake.

“Oh dear,” she said. “This one’s been opened.”

“Which one?” I’d felt a tear in one envelope, but had assumed it to have been an accidental mangle from some post-sorting machine.

“It was mailed from this house. It’s being returned. ‘No such person at this address.’ Tsk. Laziness-ripping open an envelope before bothering to glance at the name. Oh, look-” She plucked another from me. “There’s another being returned. This one hasn’t been opened.” She told me who they’d been written to, and handed them back to me.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning ‘good-bye.’ She chattered about how good I was to have sent my holiday letters out with so much time to spare, and that the same happened to her every year: returned letters due to changed addresses. “Not everyone,” she commiserated, “can be so organised as we-”

I closed the door.

I carried the stack of mail into my study, and overturned it on my desk. The two returns were now on the bottom, thoroughly covered and held down. It was important to keep them under control.

Now I knew where she was. The letters had told me.

I’d written to the few Susan Maud Madisons I’d discovered, including author S. M. Madison. I’d contacted her through her publisher; no personal information about her had been available. A Susan M. Madison lived in Cambridgeshire, at Rose Cottage on Cantelupe Road. Both had returned my letters unaccepted. But one had been opened. And the estate agent had noticed that “return to sender” had been written on each in the same terse handwriting. I’d found her.

I’d wait. I didn’t want to explain it to Harry. I didn’t want to say the words out loud. Soon, he’d come downstairs, drink coffee, and go out. Eventually. By patience, I could earn the means to go upstairs to the computer, uninterrogated. I could print directions to Rose Cottage, and phone for a taxi. I’d see her today. If I could just keep still, I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone else before I spoke to her.

So it was my fault that Harry thought I was out. He’d heard the door; I was quiet here. What else would he assume?

My study is a small room. It had been added on by the previous owners as a large cupboard, had no windows, and had never been rigged for electricity. I had a desk in there, with a chair tucked under it, and a chaise along the wall, too full of books to sit on. Our computer was of necessity upstairs, in a room full of power outlets. I worked up there. I used my study to read, and to be alone. With the door closed, there was no tell-tale line of light from under the door or sound of typing to indicate occupancy. Harry wouldn’t have known I was in there.

So it’s my fault that he did what he did. He’s not a monster. He never would have made me listen.

The doorbell rang, followed by the bell cluster jingling. Harry’s feet on the stairs. The knob, and a click.

“Is Dr. Paul here?” a woman asked. She sounded too mature to be one of my students, thank goodness. I’ve had enough of students. They remind me of Gloria’s children.

“Oh,” this woman said, to what I assume was a shake of his head. “Well, I wanted to thank her. And you, of course. Mr. Paul?” That happened to him often.

“Call me Harry,” he said, not bothering to correct her.

“I don’t know what I would have done. I would have hired some solicitor, of course, but Mr. Tisch was a wonder.” Aha. Miranda Bailey. “I got out last night. He made them wake me up and let me out. He wouldn’t let them keep me till morning. There was a teenager. He’d seen Nick later that night. He’d mugged him. I hope Nick isn’t hurt.”

The voices shifted. Kitchen. Harry serves food as a reflex.

She blathered on. “You and your wife have been so kind. Mr. Tisch stood up for me. That policeman…” A pause. To shudder, to cringe? “I know he was just doing his job. But he wasn’t nice.” How fastidious of her to put it that way. How British. Polly told me that her mother was originally British.

“How is Polly?” Harry asked.

“I think Polly’s… depleted, you understand? I don’t think she has it in her to deal with me and my problems, which she shouldn’t have to anyway. She’s just a baby… I just want to pick her up in the middle of the night and hand her what she’s dropped over the side of the crib and make everything all right again…”

The kettle whistled. “It must have been hard on you, Mrs. Bailey,” Harry said. The tea drawer squeaked as it opened, spoons clinked.

“I didn’t care for it!” She forced a laugh. “But whatever Nick’s going through must be far worse. They were right to detain anyone who might have hurt him. I can’t blame them.” Pause. Sipping at the hot stuff, stirring it, blowing on it. Tea gives something to do with one’s hands. “You don’t have children, do you?” she asked him. He would shake his head. He doesn’t use words for that subject. “Well, I love my children, but sometimes it’s very hard. Will, my son, sometimes I think he’s been lost in all the fuss. He’s become peripheral. Isn’t that awful? Good grief, I’m a terrible mother…”

Here is where Harry would be embarrassed. He’s terrible with tears. When my mother died he cooked for me. He didn’t know what else to do. Miranda must be hemmed in by biscuits now. He would be thrusting them at her, making hills of them around her. “You’ve done well with Polly,” he said. “She’s a good girl.”

Miranda laughed, a sudden, horselike sound. “When I was a girl, ‘good girl’ meant something else entirely. It meant sexless. I like that ‘good girl’ means something else now. Strong. Determined. She’s a good girl. I try to tell her that, over and over I tell her, but it’s hard for words to compete with what her father did. I’m grateful that people like you tell her too. Maybe if we all keep telling her… Anyway, I’m glad there are people here who care. She must be very dear to you both, for you to have rescued me as you did. So thank you.”

She thinks Polly was like a daughter to me. I don’t even like Polly. I don’t think she’s strong. She let go when it was most important to hang on. She would have left her mother to humiliation and punishment. She’s spoiled. She thinks a mother is some kind of entitlement, something everyone just has, something easily replaced, or dispensed with entirely. She thinks mothers are permanent; she thinks mothers don’t die, don’t leave. That you can walk away and come back and there the mother will be, still breathing, still welcoming, still… making dinner? Patching clothes? That a mother is a statue in a park, who stands through graffiti and bird shit and rain and time, not eroding, not falling apart. Not walking away. She thinks mothers are made out of rock, and have no choices, and can’t shift position, and won’t leave when the persistence and drudgery drive down on them day after day. Polly thinks having a mother is her choice: Today I don’t want my mother, maybe tomorrow I will. She doesn’t know how tenuous it all is. She doesn’t know about mothers being people, sometimes terrible people. She doesn’t know to cling, to bribe, above all to not look away for a moment. She doesn’t understand that any moment they may sneak away, that they can if they want to. She doesn’t understand how tempting it is. She doesn’t know that they can, and she doesn’t know how much they think about it. How much they plan in their ticking minds what they could do if they ran away, and how it would feel. That it would feel good.

Footsteps between the carpets. Miranda wore hard heels. Into the lounge. The hiss of the heating system coming on. The neighbours driving away.

“Did she ask you to help me?” I pictured her big, hopeful eyes. Harry would want to lie but wouldn’t.

“She’s understandably confused just now,” he said.

Crying sounds again. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she said, the name coming easily. “I’m sorry. Poor Polly. She shouldn’t have been put through any of this… Do you know, when she was a little girl, she used to cry at just about anything. She cared about other people. She’d cry if someone else’s toy broke, or if they weren’t chosen for a team she was already on. She was never just herself. She felt for everyone. I never saw her cry after… what her father did. She must have. Maybe with the counsellor, or one of her friends…” Snuffling, weeping. “She cried for everyone else her whole life but couldn’t manage it for herself. Oh dear, I seem to be managing it entirely too well…”

I cried when my mother died. When the woman who raised me died. Harry circled me but didn’t get too close. I was a maelstrom. He made tea.

“Have some more tea,” he said to Miranda. I put a hand over my mouth to smother laughter as Miranda snuffled and honked her nose.

“Mrs. Bailey,” he began.

She interrupted, “Call me Miranda.”

“Miranda,” he said, “your Polly has been pushed around by some hard things, but she’s going to be all right. If she’s keeping her distance, well, it’s just because she needs to for a small while. But a girl needs her mother. I well know that from my wife. A woman needs her mother…”

“Oh, I hope so, Mr. Paul. Harry. She wasn’t happy that I came to England and… you don’t think she thinks I hurt Nick, do you? She can’t think that-”

“You’re free now, Miranda. No one thinks that. No one.”

More snuffling sounds. Cup and saucer sounds. “It made me wonder, does your wife…?”

What?

Miranda said more: “She seemed to take it all very… personally. I understand she lost her mother recently. Is there anything I can…?”

Harry laughed. It boomed out. I hadn’t heard that in years. “No. There’s nothing any of us can do.” Then, “Would you like to see my birds?”

Harry’s birds. We bought the house because of the top floor, an attic aerie for Harry’s canaries. The walls are covered with cages and prize rosettes, and in the centre is a grand aviary, waist high, for them to fly about in. They chitter all day, and birdseed has been ground into our carpet from Harry’s shoes. His hands smell like sawdust and soap.

“I keep Norwich canaries. They always cheer me up when I need it. I have a grand champion. Let me show you.”

Harry’s bloody birds. He doesn’t even name them. But he loves them; I have no doubt that he loves them. He got glasses made with plain lenses in. He has perfect vision; but he wears them up in the bird room, so if they’re ever confronted by a bespectacled judge they won’t be frightened.

When we’d just met, he’d been mad for South American birds with their colours and magnificent tails. I’d thought he might become a counter, one of those people who make lists and try to catch sight or sound of every species in the world. But somehow he got here, with these fat, round Norwiches. He tells me that some are orange, and some are white. I’ve held one, briefly. He let me hold one, because I couldn’t look. But he was impatient and nervous about it. Apparently, they ought not to be handled too long. Even when he holds them, it’s just for quick transfer from one environment to another. Never to fondle or pet. Except for me, just that one time.

He led me upstairs, and had me hold still while he clicked his tongue and rummaged in a cage. Then he brought it to me. I cupped my hands. The heart beat so quickly, it felt like a racing clock. The claws of its feet scratched my palm. Harry wanted me to understand something, to feel… something. I tried. But all I felt were feathers, and a fearful heart, and sharp feet. It was a bag of bird bits. I don’t have it in me to perceive a bird as something more than its parts. He wanted me to share something with him, but I don’t know what it was.

I tried to support the birds. A hobby is good for the mind. Then he’d brought in the fosters.

Apparently, Norwiches aren’t good at raising their own young. He takes their eggs as soon as they’re laid, and puts them in warm little drawers. He marks the date on a calendar. He has several different pens for writing on his big chart; they squeak when they write. He has “lizards” (birds so called for their markings) and fifes in cages apart from the Norwiches. He gives them the eggs, and they parent the new birds. I think that’s disgusting. Why fawn over a breed so unsuited to the fundamental functions of life?

I don’t enter the bird room anymore.

I was sure Miranda would feel the same about it. How could any mother not? How could any daughter not? He would go on about shape and feathers; how he’d successfully campaigned to make the standard rounder. He’d go on. Miranda would mark time, those fosters impossible to ignore. The “singing” is overwhelming. It comes from all sides.

Perhaps I ought to rescue her, I thought. Woman to woman. Give her a break.

The noise was indistinct, and strange. Wood smacking a wall. Was Harry building something? I couldn’t hear the bird room from my study. I was underneath a guest bedroom.

Its bed has a wide wooden headboard, up against a plaster wall. The joints must be loose. It exaggerated every movement on it, thumping like a timpani.

People feel sorry for me, not being able to see, but very little in the world is exclusively visual. This rhythm didn’t need looking at to know what it was.

There’s nothing profound that uses just one sense. There’s nothing that can hide itself by just holding up a curtain. Everything real has scent and sound and makes the air move differently. Real things shake. Real things loom. Being blind is bloody useless. For all its inconvenience I ought to be able to miss this. I ought to be able to not know, to walk by, to not see him on her. Everything I “see” is in my mind anyway. This is as vivid as if they were in front of me. This is in my mind, made of pieces of Harry I know from my own hands, and made up of envy of Miranda, who in my imagination is younger than she could be with Polly for a daughter.

The last time Harry reached for me was the day I sent Nick away. He came home just after Nick left. It was my birthday. Harry had bought flowers in the market. I smelled juice on his breath. Grocery bags crumpled at his feet. He leaned close to me but I put my hand up between us. I was still reeling from Nick. I’d remembered something. I used to have a trinket, a key chain I think. It had a lion on it. Someone had given it to me as a toy when I was very, very young. Children like lions, but that wasn’t why. They’d given it to me because I was a Leo. I suddenly remembered that. Someone, some friend of the family, giving it to me and telling me why. Because I’d been born in August. But I wasn’t born in August. My birthday is in December, my birthday was that day. My mother used to make an extra fuss to ensure I wouldn’t feel dwarfed by Christmas. But I remembered that lion. Harry put his face to mine but all I could see was an enamel painted lion head dangling from a cheap chain. I pulled back from him, from both heads, his and the lion’s. I’d said, “Liv’s upstairs,” to make him stop trying, even though she’d left before Nick.

Upstairs now, the thunk-thunk-thunk of the headboard hitting the wall continued. Miranda cried out. Then Harry too. “Oh!” he said, like he does. Like it’s taken him by surprise. The hum of pillow talk, he more than she. I couldn’t make out the words themselves but their content was predictable. Excuses. Explanations. Harry got out of bed, the squeaking, loose-jointed bed. His robe wouldn’t be there; his robe hangs on the post in our bedroom, not this one. He’d reach, then remember, and rise with his bottom bare.

Pull up trousers. Zip and belt. The bathroom is en suite. Miranda with a few minutes of privacy: Find clothes, straighten the bedspread. That’s the bed his mother sleeps in when she visits. That’s the bed his nephew used when he came last year to interview for the engineering department.

He came downstairs. I heard the door of the guest room open and close, then the whooshing sound through our pipes; she was in the bathroom, then. She came down the stairs too, her steps clicking on the wood. Neither had showered. They would still smell like what they’d just done.

I could hear the words once they were downstairs, she first: “I, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-”

“Shhh,” he comforted her.

“I didn’t mean to. I’ve been lonely. This whole… Polly doesn’t want me here. But I need to be away from home as much as she does. Her father, he-I’m divorcing him, of course. Not that I-I don’t mean that I’m trying to… You’re married. I know. I’m not trying to impinge on that. I’m not looking for something-commitment… I sound like a slut. A slag, you’d say, right? I remember that. My mother once called me a slag.” She laughed, high-pitched. They were ten feet from the door of my study.

“You’re not a slag. I shouldn’t have taken advantage.”

“It’s just… Sometimes I feel like right now is just this thing all by itself. I know that life is a… a chain… that moments are all in some kind of line and they connect and they affect each other. But sometimes I can’t feel that. I only feel now, just now, and that’s all there is. And… it was good, just now. I’ve done something terrible, but it felt good. There must be something very wrong with me.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “for two lonely people to comfort each other.”

“Thank you for that,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m the only lonely person. But I know that’s not true.” Then “No.” As if he’d leaned in to kiss her. “I have to go,” she said. The usual kerfuffle followed: footsteps, coat, where did she put down her bag when she came in?

At the door, he said, “Miranda, today was good. It was good.”

“I don’t think Gretchen would think so-”

“Gretchen doesn’t care,” he said firmly. He said it loudly. “She hasn’t for some time.”

“Oh, I-”

“No, I don’t mean… I don’t make a habit of… This isn’t something I’ve done before. I don’t mean that she would know or approve. I mean she literally doesn’t care. About anyone. Certainly not about me.”

I pictured her hand on the doorknob, ready to flee his change from gallant to vulnerable.

Indistinct murmurs at the door. The bells attached to the door jangled for the open, then for the shut. There was quiet, then his footsteps back across the rug, then up the stairs. Our shower rattles the whole plumbing system. He stayed under the spray for what seemed like a very long time.

I’d been so relieved to get married the first time. The day after university graduation, one of my lecturers asked me out. He said he’d been waiting a long time to be able to do that. I admired his self-control. We dated for a year, then got married. I’d been happy to get that done, as advised in one of my favourite poems, by Adrienne Simms:

What is it that I grieve for when I weep,

when I leave my hair untidy, lank and long,

when my clothes are unrefreshed by wash or brush,

when I thrust the curtains shut though day is young,

when my every former joy before me palls

and I stay inside of doors, inside of walls

where torrid tears escape my eyes in squalls?

What is it that I miss now that you’ve left

no half-remembered hope behind unpacked

now that you’ve taken with you much of me,

which of those things are they which I most lack?

Your company, your touch, your voice, your face?

Or, worse, my trust, my smug protected grace?

The peace that came upon the end of chase?

For when I had you I thought I was done

with girlish wishing-fors inside my mind.

No longer wanting “someone,” some grand “he,”

I had, in you, completed that sad grind

of hoping, longing, yearning from afar

for one to be my match, my prize, my star.

And being done I could, I’d hoped, do more…

I’d been happy to get that done, and then be free to do more. Sex was work: with whom, how far, what it means. Marriage would just be marriage. Marriage would just be.

When Nick discovered that my mother, or aunt, had saved a poem by the same author, I’d caught my breath. That is the synchronicity that drives me, that linkage with my mother, as if I’d been built out of real flesh torn off of her.

Everything had been fine with Dan, until four years in, when he found my birth control pills. He’d wanted children. I didn’t. He’d been assuming we were just unlucky.

I started at Magdalene a year after they started to let women in. I received a research fellowship. I’d not been to Cambridge before. The divorce was final.

Harry, a Cambridge native, had given up his law practice, and spent his savings on a trip to South America, where he’d fallen in love with birds. Then he’d returned and fallen in love with me. Then… Well, here we are.

He went straight out of the house after his shower, despite his wet hair and the cold. He’d duck inside the first chance he’d get. The pub on the corner. They don’t serve food until evening. He hadn’t even had breakfast. He’d be drunk before long.

I let my study door hang open behind me. I walked into a chair that Miranda must have moved to sit in. Harry hadn’t moved it back. He used to be careful about keeping things predictably arranged for me.

I went upstairs. Past the guest room; I didn’t open the door. Past the computer room. I carried on to the attic stairs. Up to the bird room. The noise was stifling: bird shrieks and whistles from all sides. Cold pushed in through the one screened, open window. Mountain songbirds don’t need heat. The room smelled biological: dry, thick, doughy, dirty. I felt caught by it.

I felt for the back of his chair. It’s a straight chair, no cushion. I hefted it up over my shoulder and brought it down against the top of the central aviary, by my hip. The chair bounced against the cage, and sprang back up over my head. Its next time down it bent bars. I pulled it up again, and brought it down again. The metal made a piggish sound, squealing as the bars ruptured. The birds squealed too, suddenly fat, shrieking pigs instead of light, insubstantial twitterers. A sound came out of me too. I was a pig. I groaned from my stomach, groaned like I had a baby coming out of me. My mouth stretched open even as I squeezed the rest of myself together in a crouch on the floor. I was still for so long that two of the creatures alit on me. I’d broken the aviary door. They were free.

I opened the window. Why not? It was windy out. The birds would be swept away as if with a broom.

The still-caged birds on the right-hand wall chattered with increasing volume and their jumping rattled their cages, right next to my head. These weren’t the canaries. These were the fosters.

I felt myself trembling. My fingers wriggled easily between wire bars, grabbing two cages at once. I pulled them down, tumbling the ones above them as well. I was all limbs: kicking in the cages below, waving the two in my fists. The shrieking inside them increased in fear and then died away, one by one.

There’s a pattern in S. M. Madison’s books. She starts with contentment: a heroine in an exotic location, in communion with the place itself. Conflict follows, shoving the heroine up against other people. There’s friendship and sex, but always as action, never as the goal. The end brings equilibrium again; her triumph leads back to the pleasures of her original solitude, enhanced by comfort, or confidence, or money, or safety. But still, alone, and happy. Enchanted by place, not people.

The House of the Dead begins at the Mena House Hotel overlooking the Giza pyramids:

The walls huddled together. We were all tired, the walls and I. Only the shutters were awake, begging to be opened, energised by the hot daylight on the other side. I hadn’t slept on the plane. It had been impossible, with knees and elbows on both sides, and actors racing across the soundless screen at the front of the cabin. So I slept here: cool sheets, hard mattress, small room. The edges of the fluffed pillow made a high, soft wall around my heavy head. This sleep was delicious, and decadent like an evening feast after Ramadan’s daily fasting. I was fat with this sleep. Outside, camel hoof stomps pounded sand. Outside, the pyramids faded in the strong sun. Outside, flies landed on moist, open eyes. The shutters kept all of them out. The shutters kept me in. I’m grateful to shutters. The door should take lessons. It quivered from pounding fists. Someone was getting in. The shutters held out the whole waking world, but the door couldn’t keep out one man.

It ends in the southern city of Aswan, on the famous terrace of the Old Cataract Hotel:

Yellow and blue make green; it’s true everywhere. The blue Nile and yellow desert make green life between them, a fresh, narrow swath along each side of the river. Servants make coffee. Tourists make crowds. Rolling blinds, thick and patterned like carpets from the marketplace, make the terrace cool in the hot day. The natural shape of a huge stone elephant makes visitors photograph the island across from the hotel. Wind makes dozens of white sails pull feluccas across the water. All of these are true every day.

She follows this pattern over and over. In Out of the Sea, her heroine begins in an aisle seat on an airplane, desperate for the window view of the Aegean below. Her fellow passengers, like the one blocking her view, are impediments to her experience. Over and over, this S. M. Madison prizes place over people. Over and over, she finds peace in hotels, not a home.

Her fictional beginnings and endings became a comfort to me. Her abandonment of me hadn’t been personal. Her affair with solitude was the most consuming in her life; that was clear.

There are moments for me too, where the primacy of place, and relationship with the inanimate, is suddenly overwhelmingly satisfying.

I may be like her. I may be meant to be alone.

Harry sometimes asked me for help with crosswords. He’d read the clue and describe how many spaces and any letters he already had. I threw answers at him, but I hated it. I hate crosswords. They seem such a waste of time. I pelted him with words of the correct length, and suggested anagrams and interpretations of the clue fragments. I reasoned that if I could give him the answer it would end. Maybe he couldn’t tell I hated it; he kept asking. He kept talking to me, until I was sick from words, mentally batting them away from my head. The words were like birds flying at me, his birds, always birds. Their noise was constant.

The two in the cages in my hands were dead. I’d beaten the cages against the wall.

I put them down and descended the ladderlike steps. In the den I pulled up the website with taxi numbers and called one. I must always explain that I’m blind, or they won’t bother to push the horn on arrival, no matter that I’ve asked.

I printed directions to Rose Cottage to give the driver.

I brushed my hair in the bathroom. I changed my clothes.

The taxi’s horn was louder than I thought it would be. I jumped, I dropped my bag. It blasted again, twice, hard. My head throbbed. I opened the door.

I knew it was nothing personal. I could see that. She got rid of me because of who she is, because she doesn’t share life with anyone. It wasn’t me, it had nothing to do with me. I comforted myself with that truth, pulled it around me like a smooth sheet, a coarse blanket, and a soft cotton sleeve.

CHAPTER 9

The driver offered to walk me to the door of Rose Cottage, but I wanted the transition to myself. I’d brought my cane. Its tip swished through the longish grass until it scraped on hard path for me to follow. I rapped on the front door.

I tried to age the young woman that I carried in my mind: the woman from the Brussels photographs, the woman who wrote about children with fear and disgust. I tried to age her, but I didn’t know what had happened between now and then. So a young woman opened the door to me, wearing the green dress she’d worn to dinner in the Atomium restaurant in Brussels. She spoke with an old voice, but I saw the girl in the green dress. I suddenly remembered her perfume. I don’t know if she still wore it, or if it was another of those sudden memories that had been jumping out in front of me since Nick changed everything.

“What do you want?” said the old-woman voice.

My voice answered, also old. Amazingly old. In my mind I was young too: in my twenties, out of college, not yet married. We looked alike to me. We both looked like the young woman at the Brussels Expo. Then we spoke, and the vision splintered apart. “Why did you have me?” I asked.

This wasn’t the plan. The plan had been to persuade, to defend; to prove who I was and accuse who she was. Then to ask at last: Why did you leave me? But the question asked itself, and it was more important than the one I’d intended.

She didn’t answer, not quickly. She was examining me. Of course she would be; I’d skipped ahead. Then she retreated, leaving the door open. I followed her into a low-ceilinged room; I could feel the pressure of it, and the air smelled like the windows were closed. A fire made scratching noises in the corner. A jungle of furniture grew wild in the dry heat.

Her voice came from near the fire. She was faced away from me, poking it, I think. There were rustling sounds there, like a family of mice had settled into the flames. “Calling you Gretchen wasn’t my idea. A nurse named you. I didn’t have a name ready, so she called you after her dead sister. Her sister had died in a fire.” I’m sure the fire was consuming crumpled newspaper and hunks of wood. I’m sure of it, but I saw mice there. And a little girl. In a purple dress at Christmas.

“I despise waffling,” she said. “I’d come to hate Susan Maud. I hated what in me was like her. Equivocating. I wrote a scene; it was vicious. I had her raped in it. Never mind that there wasn’t even sex in any of the other books. I let it rip in this one. I held her down. I made her grow up. I was sick of her.

“It was unpublishable, of course. Unfinishable too. There wasn’t anything I wanted left to do with her after that.

“When I found out what was inside me,” and here I thought she figuratively meant her viciousness toward Susan Maud, but it became clear that she literally meant me, “I said, all right. I’m not going to pretend. I’m not going to apologise. So I stuck my belly out and everyone knew. I forced myself the way I’d forced Susan Maud: no more chance to go along and get along.”

I rocked.

“You can sit down,” she said abruptly. She waited, then spat: “It’s right behind you.” I stepped back gingerly, until my leg bumped the seat. I sat. She still stood. Her talking came from over me, still near the fire. Still far away.

“What did you come here for?” She sounded exasperated. I was suddenly a teenager, railing against a college rejection letter, or appealing punishment for breaking curfew. She was my mother. She was suddenly my mother. I cried.

Clink-clink, metal on brick. The fireplace poker. Impatience. I had to get myself together.

“She’s dead. She died,” I said, almost saying “my mother,” but I’d been training myself out of that. I’d been straining them apart in my mind: one slipping through the sieve holes, the other caught. Two mothers.

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it.” She still stood, cornered. My chair was between her and the door.

“I wanted to meet you,” I said. “I remember you.” I wanted her to remember me. Something precious and wriggly; something that looked like her. “You kept me,” I added. “For three years…” Instead of feeling abandoned, I felt chosen. Three years! Almost a thousand days. She could have given me up from the hospital bed.

“I didn’t write for three years,” she said. “Not anything complete. Pieces. I wrote Gloria, if that means anything to you.” The only mother her books had ever had. The children who were sticky, who terrified the protagonist. I was the sticky one. I climbed. I clawed. I consumed. I was the monster: small, agile, full of tricks.

The fire sighed. Wind in the chimney. My face and hands were hot; the backs of my legs were cold. I looked at the fire, which was a jagged-edged blob to me.

Another memory shot up in me like a rocket. The dog. The one she carried on the island trip. What had happened to the dog?

I must have asked out loud. She said, “It ran away.”

It did. I remembered it now. I was only two, but I remembered. She put it down in the garden and opened the gate. It ran away.

“No one could take away the money,” she said. “It was mine. It bypassed my parents. I threw it at you. I buried you in it. I hired that girl. She carried you around. She carried you. But you just kept reaching. Your arms were… so horribly long.” She shivered. “The girl wanted you. It was easy. Keeping you was hard.”

I shot up out of the chair. “What about boarding school? You didn’t need to… to sever. Why didn’t you just stretch?” Would weekends have been so horrible? Holidays?

“You!” she bellowed, from a deep, echoey space in her chest. “You’ve never had a child, have you.” It was an accusation, not a question. She panted. She snorted.

Men have wanted to put one in me, but I’ve said no. I’ve never wanted one. I didn’t know what she meant. What is there in having a child that makes boarding school not far enough? She must have really loved me, to have required such a vicious severance between us. You wouldn’t use an axe to slice bread.

“Did she steal me away?” This was my last fantasy. That I’d been wanted by both of them, only one had been more clever and more determined.

“I left open the garden gate,” she said, with a high, trickly laugh. That was the dog. Did she think the dog was here?

I shouted back, “I’m not the dog! I’m the baby!”

Suddenly we were old. Brussels was suddenly fifty years ago, Brussels was suddenly another country. I was here, in a cramped, too-warm cottage, in England, sturdy England.

“It was a long time ago.” She exhaled.

“I was born in the summer, wasn’t I?” I said. A Leo.

“It was hot,” she agreed.

“She changed my birthday. December. She celebrated my birthday in December. Was that when she took me?”

I laced my fingers, squeezing rings against knuckles.

“I’ll tell you how it was,” she said at last.

“She was friends with Gin,” she explained. “They double-dated. Gin thought she was all right, a nice girl. Bland, but Gin would like that. She liked being the one to sparkle.

“She was jealous of me. Of both of us, me and Gin, but of me especially, because of the baby.” She meant me. I was the baby. “She fussed over me, and brought me cold drinks that horrible, hot August. She offered to be the nanny. That was fine with me. She liked going fun places; she didn’t have the money herself. She liked being a better mother than I was. She liked that a lot. We were the pretty ones, Gin and I, and I was the brilliant one. And she was the… good one. None of us minded that. We all got to be the best at something.

“There was only one time it got out of hand. In Brussels. She chided me. The stairs multiplied, and you didn’t want to walk. You wanted to be carried. You’d been eating chocolate, and expected to be picked up. I said no. She wanted to lift you, but then what? Go all the way back to the hotel for a change of dress? I said no. She wiped your hands on her slip. She pulled it out from under her skirt and wiped your dirty hands with it, streaking the white linen muddy. It was disgusting. I was embarrassed. I told her I’d said no. She kept going. She even spat on her hand to swab at the most stubborn marks. Then she lifted you and passed in front of me, preceding us up the stairs. You waved your damp palms around as they dried to tackiness.”

I didn’t remember that, none of it. Not chocolate, not sticky hands, not those stairs, nor that time being carried, waving my arms.

“She was smug at the top of those stairs. The hem of her dress had a brown stain, and her slip had gone askew and was showing out the bottom. You put your hands into her hair and ran the fingers through. I looked away. It was…” Her breath shuddered. This was Gloria. This was where Gloria came from.

“I told her to take you back to the hotel and change. She left with you, but I saw her later. She looked the same. She hadn’t changed. She hadn’t even put you down. She was still carrying you, and you had ice cream, and it was falling onto the front of her dress. A white linen dress embroidered with pink and yellow flowers. The ice cream was vanilla, but its white was thick and yellowish and showed on the fabric. It showed as much as if it had been blood. She bore it like stigmata, the sacrifice of motherhood. She even tickled you to make you shake. Drops of melted ice cream festooned her frizzy hair like dew on a spider’s web.

“She was claiming you, as if she’d swollen up around you and squeezed you out. I don’t know why she didn’t have a child if that’s what she wanted so badly. It’s not difficult to get a child. I know that. Anyone can have a child. Even my mother had children, and she despised my father. She fought him off. But there we were, Gin and I.”

I never saw her, the nanny, touch a man. Not my whole life. She never left me with a babysitter for a weekend away, or had a man over for dinner. She worked as a secretary at my school during the day. “What was her name?” I asked suddenly. It had only just occurred to me that I didn’t know.

“What do you mean?”

“She called herself Linda Paul. She pretended to be you. You let her be you. What was her real name?”

“I don’t know,” she said. That answer just popped out of her: no caginess, no shame, no reaching deep into the bag to see if it might be in one of the corners. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“She said my father…” I’d never said that phrase before: my father. Compared to my mother, it hadn’t seemed important. “… was her-your-accountant. She had a picture of him, in white tie. At a party.”

“He certainly was not.” She snorted. “Our family accountant was a pig-bellied dirty old man.”

“Who was he, then?” I asked.

“A man in white tie at a party? Any one of thousands, I would imagine. It doesn’t matter, you know. They don’t matter.”

“I just want to know,” I explained carefully, wary of using up her willingness to speak, “in case it turns out to matter.”

She told me. There were two men, both married academics, and she’d had affairs with both of them around that time. I asked their specialities, and was unsurprised that one was an expert in literature. The other was a botanist. Of course the kind of genetic assumption I so quickly leapt to is faulty; the botanist would be the first to chide me that humans are not so predictably determined by their parents as are plants.

“I’m a member of the English Faculty at Cambridge. Magdalene.” I remembered handing my mother picked violets once. But I couldn’t remember which mother it had been.

“You don’t take after me, then,” she said. She snorted. I think she was laughing at me. Had she been bad at school? Had she disliked teachers?

“You must know her name,” I pressed.

“She wanted to be Linda Paul. She wanted it, so I let her have it. Fine with me.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why would anyone want to be you?”

She laughed and laughed. “Thank God. I was getting sick of you. That pleading face. So avid.”

“Why was she so eager to replace her name?” I persisted.

“Why not? So was I. Being a child is such a horrible thing: powerless, stifled. She admired what I’d been able to do with money. Travel and such. She hadn’t, she wanted to. You can’t tell someone that what they want isn’t what they think it must be. You can’t tell them; you can only let them go ahead with it. They’ll find out soon enough. She wanted the name and the baby and the money. I let her have them all. We each thought we got the better deal.”

“What did she give you?”

A satisfied sigh. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Her book Half Moon contained a scene in which that word was repeated, just that way: an exultation. It was the comfort of the nothing that comes after something too loud, too close, too much. A good nothing, without a needy daughter and the uncomfortable role of socialite shaping her from the outside. She was water spilled at last out of an uncomfortable jar; that was in her book Noisy Birds. Water can’t resist its container’s shape; it’s free only if it leaves the jar entirely. She got out by inviting infill from… the nanny. “You must know her name,” I begged. “To give her the money… there must have been papers…”

“The money was in your name.” Of course it was. It was a trust. It had always been mine. “The trustee was Linda Paul. I gave her my National Insurance number. I didn’t want it. The books… I’d written them. I was done with them. I was sick of them.”

“But you became Susan-”

“We fled together, Susan Maud and I. Having the whole world to choose from, I named myself the character I’d created. I became my own, from start to finish. My own mother. My own child. I was completely my own at last.”

Is that what she’d wanted? Had that been her “pear”? Something worth sacrificing everything else for…

“You sent the photos to our house in Brighton. I have them.” She’d reused a box of her own. Someone had mailed something to her, here on Cantelupe Road, and she’d put a sticker over that address to mail the photos to me.

“That was years ago.”

She could have thrown them away. “Thank you for doing that.”

I hadn’t thought I’d thank her. I thought I’d bellow at her. I thought I’d push and cry and never forgive. But I hadn’t the energy. I was old. My mother wasn’t a girl, and neither was I. We were old and tired.

Her telephone had an old-fashioned bell, a jarring one. It shrieked four times. Then a click, a whir. “Leave a message.” Succinct.

“Hi, Susan, it’s me, Melisma. I’m… having a rather bad day, actually. A shitty day. Roger and I are done. Really done this time-he’s such a prick. I hate him. I’m sorry to be springing this on you, but, really, I need to get out of here. I’m taking all my stuff so he won’t have any reason to come by bringing me this or that, ‘Oh, Mel, you forgot your soap,’ or whatever stupid excuse he’d make. There are some things I’d like to leave but I won’t because he’ll think I want a reason to come back, which I don’t. I’ll just take everything and chuck what’s useless. Fucking men. I need to pack everything up here and then I’ll bring it over. I hope you don’t mind. ’Bye.”

“My stepdaughter,” she said heavily, before the machine had even clicked off. She got up and keys jangled. “You’ll have to leave now.”

Her stepdaughter. Another daughter. She was running to her now, to comfort her, to commiserate about her awful ex-boyfriend, to protect her, perhaps to put ice on bruises if he was a beast, and encouragement on her ego if he was merely horrid. This was a real daughter. Not one from inside her, but one for whom she’d instantly leap to action. She put her coat on. Shoes. Closet door, rustles, heel clicks, the bang of a purse hitting the wall as she bent over to… tie laces? Slip a finger between the back of her foot and tight shoe leather?

“You’ll have to go now,” she repeated. I remained in my chair. I was pinned there by the image. There must be photos of her in this room, lovingly framed. Hundreds of them, interspersed with lit candles. Scrapbooks too. Newspaper items, degree certificates. That’s what so crowded the room. That’s why there was only one seat in the lounge. It was filled with shelves and stacks and icons and altars dedicated to this one creature, this real daughter. This horribly-named creature. Melisma? Linda hadn’t named her. But she’d taken to her. I know that because of how she was running now, running to rescue her.

Together they’d carry boxes from flat to car. Clothes, books, bathroom things, kitchen things, art, photographs. Whatever had intertwined to make Melisma a couple with that rat, now uncoupled. Linda would make her tea here later, or get drunk with her, if she was that sort of mother. That sort of best-friend mother. Or perhaps she was a stern mother, a pull-yourself-together mother: Get a better job and stop throwing yourself at men who aren’t worthy of you.

I couldn’t match this with the mother I thought I’d figured out: defensive of her solitude to the point of terror. But here she was. The door was open. Melisma had phoned and everything in her jumped to attention.

Whatever this Melisma had done-been sighted, been of an independent age, been good and beautiful-she’d won. She’d swooped in and won. Now Linda was swooping to her. Rescue, rescue, with a metaphorical siren on top of her car.

I realised that I’d used Aunt Ginny’s image for Melisma in my mind. Pretty Aunt Ginny, so like Linda, but a little more forward, a little more willing to be crazy in public. I had to ask: “Did Aunt Ginny die on a boat? She”-the nanny-mother-“told me Gin died on a boat…”

“Gin married one of those Italian princes. I suppose she’s still there. In a villa.”

That’s good for Aunt Ginny. I felt such relief. Gin alive, and married. Probably skiing and sunbathing, and having affairs. She’d be old now, but still Gin. Heavy with jewellery and tight in a girdle, to lift and squeeze her body into remembered youth. I was suddenly happy, so happy. I think I was hysterical. I think I was making some noise. Linda shouted at me to be quiet and get out.

I stood in the garden. Linda got into her car. The door slammed but the engine did not immediately start. Was she waiting for me to go? I held my mobile up to my ear, to show her that things were in hand. I wouldn’t be here when she and the real daughter returned.

I kept the phone pressed to my ear for show, mouthing “Everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine…” At last the car pulled away.

The garden seemed enormous to me, probably larger than it really was. Everything seemed stretched out, as if there were an impossible distance between me and the road. I could dial anyone, anyone in the world. Gin? Harry? God? I could dial anyone. What would I say to my first husband? What would I say to my old thesis supervisor? What would I say to Nick?

That name was sudden in my mind, and stabbing. Nick. He was just a child. I’d bellowed at him like he was some monstrous adult, a stand-in for those who’d let me down. I’d scared him off. I’d scared him, perhaps, to death.

For a moment it was as if I might find him in the bushes there, or the flowerbed, there. Hiding, relieved to see me, eager to emerge. I wanted to hold out my hands to him, and raise him to standing. I think that was the first maternal instinct of my life. I think that was the first moment of not being the child myself.

I dialled Harry. The ringing went on forever. Then, our machine. He would still be at the pub. “Harry,” I said. “Harry, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve been horrible. Harry. I’m at this place. Rose Cottage. The directions are on the computer. I need a lift. I’ll wait for you to come. I’ll wait for you. Please come. I want to… I want to change everything. I want to be different. I want to… throw things away, and move house, and start something new. With you. We should start new together. I know what happened today. I understand it. I don’t care about it. I don’t care. I’m going to get rid of the money, Harry.” This decision surprised me to hear coming out of myself, but it was right. It was necessary. “I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want anything from her. We can put it all to charity. Tomorrow. Quickly. I want it gone. Oh, God-” I remembered. “Oh, God, your birds, Harry. I’m sorry. Oh, God-” But the machine had clicked off. A sixty-second limit.

He would never forgive me. It was impossible. When I heard the car an hour later, his car, I knew there was rage inside. That’s all it could possibly be; I’d waited for it. I walked toward the road; I stood on the last of the lawn before the dirt track. The headlamps angled to face me. I could see them, like the bright lights of the Centre for Mathematics. I regretted never having seen his face.

The inevitable acceleration hummed rather than shrieked. I thought about all the times in my life that that had been true: things that ought to rate a fanfare, or applause, some volume, some notice, but happen quietly, too quietly, without the yelling and pointing they deserve.

The bumper hit me lower than I expected, around the knees. I’d illogically expected more of a punch in the stomach. My legs bent the wrong way, like deer legs, bent backward. But instead of crumbling, I sailed.

This too stretched. My arc blazed long. At the top of it, my head opened up like a net, catching in it old memories and random thoughts from the air. I knew. Suddenly I knew everything.

Her name was Eleanor. That was certain, and clear. Eleanor. I’d called her that sometimes. Sometimes, even in Brussels, I’d called her Mummy.

Eleanor borrowed Gin’s perfume. Eleanor wore Linda’s clothes. She was soft-skinned but hard-boned; she stood up to Linda about me. She made rabbit shadows with her hands. She let me sit on her lap on the train to see out the window. She gave me sips from her cup. She loved me. She worshipped Linda.

She’d been pretty to me, in her gift clothes and borrowed cosmetics. Eleanor had been pretty to me. But Linda had been astonishing to both of us.

One night, Linda had modelled dresses for us. She was dressing for an evening out. I sat on Eleanor’s lap, and we clapped and cheered at each successive outfit. There was one that Eleanor had particularly admired: It was girlish, layers of skirt and tight on top. Linda stepped out of it and tossed it to Eleanor. “Try it on,” she said. “I don’t like it anymore.” Eleanor undressed, curling herself up modestly, holding the dress up so its skirt made an impromptu curtain. It fit in size but not in shape. The waist stretched too tight, the bust sagged. She looked terrified in it. Linda said, “It looks good.” Eleanor puffed up; the pride in her risen chest almost made it fit.

The doorbell rang, and Linda, in just a slip, said, “I’m too tired to go out with him. You go.” Eleanor cowered. She shook her head, hard.

Linda said, “Tell him to go away, then.” She went into the bedroom and closed the door. The doorbell chimed on. It was a nice doorbell, not one of those harsh ones. It had a ring, a real ring. I sang along with the tune as it repeated, and swung my short legs back and forth under my chair.

Eleanor said, “Gretchen, you tell him. Tell him I can’t go.” Then she locked herself in the bathroom.

I stayed in my chair. The bell sang me songs. Then it stopped. Later, Eleanor came out. She still had the dress on.

She read to me from a storybook illustrated by Marc Chagall. I was still young enough to see. I put my face right up to those pictures. His happiest people always float in the air. Goats too. Happy people, floating goats.

Eleanor loved books. She made me love them too; it was inevitable that anyone who lived in our house would become an expert in literature, whether they wanted to be or not. She loved adventure in books. She loved men in books. She was in awe of people who created books the way religious people are in awe of God.

Chagall contained happiness like that: colour and captured motion, tethered by a frame or windowpane. His figures aren’t limited to feeling happiness inside; they float and fly, arc through the sky. And their goats fly with them.

The downward half of my arc sped up, rushing me toward the rutted road. I passed a goat. I trailed colour. Suddenly I was in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the paintings were all Chagalls, from that storybook. Eleanor was there. Wearing that dress.