Why weren’t you asked to stay too? I ask her.
I don’t know, she wails. I think it was D — she only wanted the others to stay, not me. They got different invitations from mine. They were talking about it all week at school.
So you knew? I said.
She nods miserably. I am so angry, with D and the parents of D, with myself, with the world for its cruelty, that I am seized by the desire to take things into my own hands. I want justice, and I want it most of all from D, because I had liked her more than the others.
Let’s go back, I say. I want to talk to D’s parents.
Don’t, my daughter says, half-smiling though her face is still wet.
If you’d told me, I said, I would never have let you go. I would never have let that happen to you.
I suspect a calculated cruelty somewhere in my daughter’s social misfortunes. It is as though she has been ostracised, cast out; as though her parents’ separation is a mark of shame that has led others to spurn her. Is this civilisation too? People have come out to comfort me, the warrior; but to her, the victim, they show a carelessness that borders on contempt.
They probably didn’t even realise, she sighs, looking out of the window into the darkness. They probably didn’t even think about it. That’s just what people are like.
Around the corner from my house there is a florist’s. I have walked past it many times. When it is open, a green canopy is out and the pavement beneath it is like a little scented garden filled with plants and flowers, with containers overflowing with colour, with frothing drifts of blooms that sway and ripple brilliantly in the grey high-street breezes. I appreciate flowers these days. Flowers are not food. When it is closed the canopy is retracted and the garden vanishes; the shutters are tightly sealed across the shopfront. The facade is so blank it is difficult even to find it amongst the other shops.
Though I am familiar with it, something about the change from one state to the other has attracted my notice anew. I find that I recognise its rhythms and the transformation they bring, one day so blank and shuttered, the next so full of life. They remind me of the way my own house now opens and closes, is either welcoming or withdrawn, depending on the whereabouts of the children; of my new feelings of impermanence, this gypsy life that has no past or future, only a fragile itinerant present. The big supermarket down the road is always open: all day its electric doors slide stolidly back and forth, admitting and discharging streams of people. Its neon-lit space is so impersonal and so eternal that it emanates both comfort and alienation. Inside you can forget that you’re not alone, or that you are. Sometimes I buy flowers there and put them in my daughters’ bedrooms. They come in plastic sheaths, a handful of deracinated blooms, a mass-produced representation of beauty like a postcard of the Mona Lisa. They look pretty enough; after a few days I throw them away.
One day, walking past the florist’s with a friend, we stop. The canopy is out; the pavement is in its scented glory. My friend wants to buy me some flowers. Come on, she says. Let’s go in. For a moment I am frightened, as I have learned to be now of beautiful things, frightened they will contain lacerating shards of nostalgia. I don’t go near the photograph album any more, don’t look at the art books I once loved, don’t listen to the music or read the poetry that have been my life’s companions; don’t walk on the hills I walked with my husband, don’t contemplate foreign trips or visits to interesting places. And I don’t eat, for fear that nourishment will hurt me with its inferences of pleasure. Standing outside the florist’s I feel, suddenly, the completeness of my impoverishment. I feel transparent with bereavement: there is nothing, any more, I can look on and feel safe.
The plate-glass window is dark with foliage, in whose recesses the pale, waxy forms of indoor lilies and white roses stand like virginal icons. Inside there is a clean, leafy smell, and suddenly silence, tranquillity. We wander around the cool, lofty space with its fronds and ferns. At the end, behind a wooden counter, three women in green aprons are working. The counter is heaped with flowers: in their hands they hold scissors and twine. I watch for a while as they pluck the stems from the pile, deftly combining and recombining, binding the stalks with quick fingers, like classical maidens preparing their festal tributes. The bouquets grow and become splendid in their pale hands. It strikes me that they might be for a wedding, but all the same I feel a certain relief in here. There is no chromosomal presence of the male: this cool and scented place is a grove of femininity, its fecundity somehow pure, as though no conflict, no struggle of opposites needed to occur to bring these smells and shapes to completeness. I look at the different flowers in their sheaves: their pretty moulded heads, each so articulated and distinct, remind me of my daughters. I will buy some, and put them in their rooms. Perhaps I’ll also buy a fern: the soft shape and something ancient about the scroll-like leaves appeals to me. Ferns are old, older than civilisation, older than man and woman, older than right and wrong. They are sexless, having neither seeds nor flowers. They are vascular plants, conductors, sensitive to contamination. They furl and unfurl, depending on the conditions. I don’t know how I know these things, for I’ve never owned one, though I’ve always wanted to. I’ll buy a fern, and I’ll keep it alive.
At the counter the women are absorbed in their task. They haven’t realised, perhaps, that we are here. We could leave and they would never know that we had come. My friend goes to the counter. Excuse me, she says, and all three of them look up.
THE RAZOR’S EDGE
My great-uncle and — aunt were husband and wife for more than seventy years, and to talk to them was to walk the razor’s edge of marriage, where self meets other. Do you like music, uncle? Oh yes I’m very fond of music, but she can’t tell the difference between Beethoven and ‘Jingle Bells’. Aunt, what are your summer plans? I’d like to go to Spain, but of course he won’t go there, he says he can’t stand the people.
As a child I liked to visit their house, where my great-uncle’s golf clubs stood in a leather stand in the hall and my aunt’s knitting machine, like a vast steel spider in its trap of yarns, could be glimpsed through the spare-room door. Unlike ours, their Christmas-tree decorations were the edible kind: they would give us one each when we left, taking the little foil-wrapped chocolate shapes down from the branches. Their sitting room smelled of Pledge and of the long, silken-haired lapdogs they kept, and under the window was a tan-coloured piano whose lid was always closed. My uncle often talked of how he used to play, but one day I asked him to and stood beside him in acute embarrassment while his large old hands moved meaninglessly around the keys. How was it possible to forget to play the piano? It was alarming to me, at eight or ten, to learn that competence could be lost as well as gained, that life was not merely a series of acquisitions and enlargements, of linear evolutions. Apparently it was possible to go backwards: blankness and ignorance were things to which one could be returned at any time.
He never bothered to keep it up, my aunt said.
She never liked it when I played, my uncle said.
To each other they were He and She, the primary object, the thing that was not I. They had met and married at nineteen, had children together, lived together through war and peace. As they grew older they became ever more concrete to one another, while their own selves grew increasingly formless; after seventy years of marriage they were imprisoned in one another like water imprisoned in its courses of sculpted rock. Often they would neglect to mention themselves at all, as though they had become less real to themselves, were vague spaces of pure inference, like shadows.