Marian found herself following an unexpected train of thought. She went to the old toy chest in the TV room and dug out the biscuit tin from the bottom. It had never occurred to her to check the money after she had moved it here; she had only feared a burglary. Now she suddenly thought with puzzlement about what she had been distracted from these last few weeks, worrying about Euan, advertising for and interviewing the new housekeeper. Tam-sin had flickered distractingly on her horizon in a succession of splendid outfits: trouser suits, jeans with skinny T-shirts, a velvet pinafore, a beaded blouse, a short chiffon dress with satin appliqué. Now it occurred to Marian for the first time to ask how she had possibly been able to afford these — and her share of rent and bills and food money — when she only seemed to be working half her usual hours. It had seemed a sort of conjuring trick or a sort of genius, something beautiful youth could do that wasn’t for dingy middle age to question.
She knelt on the carpet in the TV room and opened her father’s slightly rusted old biscuit tin, breaking a fingernail on it. She tipped the money out. More money had gone, much much more; Marian’s hands were so sweaty and shaking so nervously and her thoughts were racing so fast that she couldn’t focus to count it properly; she kept on making piles of notes and then forgetting how much was in each pile and having to recount them. Perhaps a thousand pounds was gone altogether, a whole thousand pounds; only because she was so upset she didn’t trust herself to have done her sums properly, she had better start again. When she started counting again she began to cry, rather loudly and excessively, as if there was a point to this crying and it was not quite for herself alone; and after a while the crying took over and she gave up counting. She wiped her soaking face and runny nose on an old blouse of hers that had been folded on top of her workbasket, waiting to have its button sewn on and a rip mended.
Someone put a hand on her arm.
Crouched on her haunches opposite where Marian had collapsed was Tamsin, changed out of the crimson dress into leggings and baggy T-shirt: Tamsin peering at her with a mixture of dismay and, ready close behind it, annoyance.
— Mum, for God’s sake! It’s only money.
But it wasn’t only money. It was the flash of a crimson dress, and the door banged shut.
* * *
MARIAN HAD A DREAM. It was such a blessed dream; she tried to explain it to her father. They had a morning’s respite from his pains and his troubles (his eyes were too bad, he had had to give up writing the Dostoevski book). They seemed to have found a live-in housekeeper who was suitable, although Marian could already see the fault lines along which the arrangement would fracture: Dana filled the flat with expensive bunches of flowers (like a funeral, Euan said) and called him sweetheart and poppet. She had pretty eyes and a strong jaw and favored pastel dresses; Marian suspected she might be a transsexual and wondered if Euan suspected it too, and whether he’d mind.
It was Saturday, Dana’s day off: Marian made them both coffee.
— I was in a meadow. I know in the dream that’s what I called it, though I also thought pré, like the French. Anyway, it was a lovely meadow full of long grass, all different species of grass, and hundreds of kinds of flowers, sloping away out of sight in the sunlight, and everywhere you looked there were butterflies, hundreds and thousands of them, beautiful ones, rare ones, going from flower to flower collecting nectar, and then when you looked closer there were little animals too, all kinds of species mixed together, hares and field mice and little black foxlike things with big ears — that was because someone at school was talking about seeing fennec foxes at the zoo. And then I saw there was something dangling in the grass; there’d been some sort of fall — if you can imagine that on a perfectly fine day — like an ice storm, and hanging in the long grass were these ice medallions, perfect and transparent like glass but formed in the shape of pictures, perfect tiny pictures, of deer and castles and dogs and trees. And I knew it was a paradox — I knew the really amazing thing was that they had been accidentally arrived at, in nature, these perfect representations. I knew that once I’d seen these, it had to change everything I believed about the world and about what was possible.
But Euan looked at her confusedly, and she had to give up her attempt to explain how it had charmed her and made her happy when she woke up, and how it was still with her now, like a dispensation, a sign of reassurance whose explicit meaning lay just out of reach.
He was very vague this morning.
— Where was this? he asked her irritatedly. Where did you say you’d been?
CLARE THOUGHT about Helly, her best friend.
She was cooking fish fingers for the children’s lunch; Helly didn’t have any children. It was raining outside. There was another week before Coco and Lily went back to school and Rose to nursery. That morning Rose had woken them at six o’clock, and Clare, whose turn it was to get up, had sat resentfully downstairs watching Rose play for an hour and a half before the others got up, drinking tea and listening to farming programs on the radio, wrapping her cold feet in the hem of an old pinkish-gray nightgown that had once belonged to Bram’s grandmother. In fact it still had Bram’s grandmother’s name stitched into the neck, from when she had ended up in an old people’s home where all their washing was done together and things got mixed up and lost.
Bram got up and went to work. Since then Clare had made breakfast for the children, washed the dishes, got them all dressed, tidied the beds. She had sorted out a load of washing for the machine and hung it out on one of the two drooping wooden clothes horses she had to use to dry the clothes in a corner of the kitchen when it wasn’t fine enough to hang them outdoors: their rungs were permanently blackened with wet and left marks on pale clothes if you weren’t careful. The children had mostly watched the television (Clare had bought it for them at the beginning of the summer and they hadn’t fallen out of love with it yet). Rose had managed to step on the Tintin comic Coco was meticulously drawing with a ruler and pencil crayons; she crumpled and tore it and left a dirty bare footmark. Coco understandably but unpicturesquely went berserk, trying to pound his baby sister with his fists and baring his teeth and squeezing out from between them a kind of growling scream. Clare thought helplessly of different, better children somewhere sometime else who played adventurous games together away from the adults and had been taught self-control and discipline and that you didn’t hit girls or anyone younger than yourself. She sagged with the sense of a lost civilization and was nagged by a guilty idea that she ought to be doing something creative with them. But she knew what it was if you began creative things without conviction, how quickly you were found out, how shamingly your temper would fasten on their ingratitude.
And anyway, there were all these other uncreative things she had to do, taking up an impossible space, swelling to stuff out every corner of her time and to smother any chinks she had fondly imagined she was keeping for a grown-up coffee and a read of the paper. Now it was lunchtime; the children must be fed. One felt as if one invented this stuff in some kind of crazy conspiracy of martyrdom; surely other better mothers had found sweeter brighter ways of passing their days than this? She must be producing this impasse, this stickily inflating burden of routine, out of sheer spite; it must be oozing from her own smothered vengefulness. But if she tried to come clean and step out of it, she was confronted with real unanswerable problems. What would happen if she didn’t feed them? Didn’t dress them? Didn’t tidy the house and wash the dishes and wash the clothes and shop and cook? It wouldn’t be liberation, they would simply all drown deeper and more miserably in their sticky mire. This domestic machine required her drudgery, implacably; the hours of her life were the fuel it needed just to tick over.