— Why don’t you find somewhere more comfortable to read, darling? asked Marian.
— I like it here by you.
You could catch a sort of circling of glances and gestures and smiles around the table. Marian squeezed Clare’s hand or lent her a tissue or a pen; they passed Naomi’s sewing from hand to hand to admire it. Naomi made coffee and they took a break. Marian talked about a friend at school who had had a mastectomy and was trying to persuade her to come to yoga classes. Naomi told them about a jacket she’d seen in Monsoon and was tempted by. She also mentioned a flat she’d heard about through a friend at work, which might be possible for her.
— Which friend was that? asked Clare.
— Oh, just the bloke who runs the cellar, really nice actually. He’s just come out of a gay relationship like me, and he’s trying to decide what it was all about. We’ve been comparing notes.
— Naomi, said Clare, don’t get involved with renting a flat or anything from a friend. You know how these things end up.
— Oh, it’s OK, nothing like that, said Naomi, blushing. Anyway, he’s about fifteen years younger than me.
Clare talked about George Sand coming to stay at Flaubert’s house, and how she got along with his mother. Then she mentioned that Rose, her younger daughter, who was four, had been in trouble at nursery that day.
— Mrs. Worral couldn’t wait to tell me. She’s so ghastly. She gives them pictures of policemen to color in and tells them off if they don’t use blue: believe me. We don’t like her but we like the school, so we think it’s worth keeping Rosie on there. Apparently Rose had offered a sweetie to this little boy that turned out to be a bead from a game or something. So I’m supposed to give Rose a serious talk on the dangers of choking. But the trouble is—
Then Clare suddenly couldn’t go on; she pressed her mouth with her fist, her nose went red, her eyes filled with tears, and her voice changed register.
— The trouble is I don’t want to say anything negative to them at all. I only want to say nice things. I feel so guilty I can’t tell them off. It’s so pathetic.
— Of course you can’t, darling, said Marian.
— Why should you? said Naomi. She was only playing.
— Oh, no, said Clare, recovering herself. Rose actually has a thing against that particular boy. I’m sure she knew it was a bead. I’m sure she meant to choke him, in fact.
When he ran the pictures through on the viewfinder, Toby thought for a moment he could actually see something flowing around the table, like a slight distortion in the tape: a stream flowing between the three women, a stream of kindness, of sympathetic intuition, of wishing one another well.
* * *
IT WAS STRANGE, Marian thought, how during that time the three of them could sit around the table so peacefully in the evenings. The peace was reaclass="underline" although of course she was always worried about Clare and her situation, it was sometimes nonetheless real, and blissful, for half an hour, an hour at a time. In her imagination it even lapped away from where they sat with their heads bent over their work at the table, to wash around and include Toby and Tamsin, whether they wanted it or not: Toby hovering neutrally in that slightly exasperating way he had, as though he imagined he was invisible, all gangling six foot two of him; Tamsin fortified in her hostility in front of the television in the next room. Like a mother hen, she was still warmed by the sensation of her chickens safe under her wings. And just like a dumb imposed-upon hen, her warm sensation of family seemed to have adjusted itself to accommodate even these two others, these interlopers, these ones she had not asked for.
Sometimes, suddenly, like a dark flash exploding on her inner eye right in the middle of all the peace and the pink-shaded light, there came a picture. She remembered Naomi sitting at another table in another kitchen: this was the kitchen in the house where, a quarter of a century before, Graham (Clare’s and Tamsin’s and Toby’s father) had been in the process of leaving Marian. She could not imagine what Naomi had been doing in that house. She could certainly only have come there once or twice in all that terrible time, which Marian thought of, if she ever thought of it at all now, as a kind of melting down, a humiliating reduction to mush and pulp of all the substance of her flesh and self and personality. It was the only time in her life she had ever tasted anything like that self-abandonment; it was the only way she knew she had inside her — buried deep now under the concrete of everything steadying that had happened since — such a howling thrashing screeching frightful creature.
She could not imagine what Naomi had been doing there in her kitchen, but she knew what Naomi had been wearing, knew the exact words that had come into her head, then, to describe what she was wearing: it was a dress worthy of a princess. She thought that to herself; she didn’t say it. The dress was made in India, when fantastical things were still coming out of India, out of several different brilliant red-patterned prints; the skirt, tied with a sash around her diminutive waist, was vast and long with bands of braid and embroidery at the hem; the bodice and the cuffs of the long sleeves were thickly embroidered. Naomi sat on a tall stool at Marian’s kitchen table. The skirt of the dress fell like a scarlet wing to the floor behind her; she pushed her long black hair back from her pale face, clasped her hands in her lap, and stared desperately ahead. She looked like a suffering saint. It was an ordeal she must have put herself through as some sort of penance. She couldn’t meet Marian’s eyes; perhaps Marian was howling at her. Graham must have been there but Marian couldn’t remember him; Clare and Tamsin must have been upstairs in bed (in bed but surely not asleep, surely listening to their mother losing herself).
Naomi had looked perfect. Marian could see that, that was exactly what she saw. She looked like a princess, an impossible prize, she glowed with helpless involuntary youth and beauty, the clean sharp jawline, the skin like cream, the tiny waist like a stem that could be broken, the small cuppable breasts swelling under her bodice. She must have been twenty. The envy Marian felt was like a hunger, it was like sexual desire, it was as though she were feeling by proxy what her husband must feel, the baffled devouring need to press this perfection to your breast, to penetrate it, to break it open, to find its explanation.
Instead, Marian had picked up the heavy chrome pasta-making machine Graham had given her for Christmas and thrown it at Naomi’s head as hard as she could. Naomi screamed and dodged, and the pasta machine crashed into some china on the table and then onto the floor, where it broke. She hadn’t wanted it for Christmas anyway — how could she, with two small children, possibly want to make her own spaghetti? She had wondered when it was given what message it could have for her, this unwanted unuseful thing that took up so much space. And, oh, yes, at this point Graham came bounding back into the picture from wherever he’d been lurking, consoling and anxious and raising his voice in insufferable protective indignation. Of course it was true that if she hadn’t thrown so clumsily, if the pasta machine hadn’t been quite so awkward to take hold of, she could have killed Naomi. Of course. That was the whole point.
But now she and Naomi, who was not killed, sat at peace at the same table together: what did that mean? What had once mattered so terribly didn’t matter anymore. And now Naomi had ropes of tendon in her neck, her flesh was loosening from under her jaw, she had deeply incised lines under her eyes and beside her nose, she had a little pot belly that showed when she wore tight trousers. She was still sometimes pretty, but the other day Marian had noticed, standing behind her, that on the crown of her head you could see her scalp through her thinning hair. And Naomi feared Tamsin. Tamsin was rude and unfriendly but it wasn’t simply that: Naomi flinched if she had to speak to her or hand her anything, as if the contrast between them — her worn face and hand and Tamsin’s glossy presumptuous youth — was scalding, exposing, something Naomi could not forgive herself.