‘Party time,’ Michael said, under his breath.
Well, we did go a bit daft after that, I will admit. It was late for Steph to be taking Charlie home, so Michael drove them down to the edge of the village and Steph walked him in the pushchair from there. She wanted to arrive on foot, thinking that Sally might already be home (she wasn’t). She knew she would go berserk if she saw them and found out that Charlie had been travelling in her arms in the front of the van, not in a proper car seat, and of course on top of that Sally knew nothing of Michael’s existence. Do you begin to see the trouble we took to keep everybody happy?
It happened to be Steph’s payday, and when she met up with Michael again they went off to Corsham and bought a Chinese takeaway. They had decided between them, the sweethearts, that I had had too demanding a day to cook that night! In fact they bought so much food that the man taking the order threw in free Cokes and prawn crackers, a calendar and a bottle of soy sauce. It felt like a sort of approval. They came back giggling. Then Michael said the occasion called for something special and got four bottles of champagne up from the cellar. I don’t have a good memory for the names of wines, because we tried so many. But Steph stuck a candle in one of the empties from that night and it’s been on the table ever since, so I know that it was a 1988 Krug, which Michael would insist is marvellous. It wasn’t the ideal thing with sweet and sour though, and I think it was the combination of the two, plus the release of all the tension, that caused me to be ill so suddenly that evening. I would like it to be understood that afterwards I made every effort with the carpet. By the way, the rings on the dining table date from that evening too. There was such an air of celebration we didn’t even notice how much soy sauce was escaping down the side of the bottle. Actually, when we did, it didn’t seem to matter. After all, it’s only a table, Michael said, and I recall that that led on to us talking about possessions in general, and how it is that the objects that bear the marks of events in our lives are always the ones most precious to us. There was general agreement on this point.
June
Oh, it was like a life from the pages of a magazine for a while. There was the weather. I don’t believe I have ever noticed the weather so much before. Here, the seasons get themselves noticed in a way that does not happen in towns, and by the time the summer really arrived I had developed something of a countrywoman’s eye for it. The garden burst into bloom, of course, a thing that I would have observed without much interest before I became the kind of person who would stick her nose into flowers and bring masses of them into the house. My choice of reading expanded out from the cookery books. In the library there were dozens of books on gardening. There was one in particular that had pictures and descriptions of just about every flower that grows in England, and I took it into the garden with me and learned the names of all the ones we had. I found that the Latin names went into my head and straight back out again, but even now in August I can still recite the common names of the flowers that came up in the garden in June. There were some I already knew, of course: fat daisies that were almost spherical like pom-poms, candytuft, forget-me-nots and wallflowers, catmint, and the peonies: both white and red ones, so many! I watched the peony buds swell like wet green fists in the rain and when they split open and the flowers came I could hardly get over them, they lolled on their stems like upended tutus, all those petals with their edges ripped into tiny points. And the colour! I wondered how that shade of crimson could be brought into existence without some juice deep underground in the root being crushed and distilled and sucked up to the very tips of the flowers. There were also Canterbury bells, columbines, leopard’s bane, bishop’s hat, foxtail lilies, Chinese trumpet flowers- every one a delight to me.
On and on it went. Birdsong woke me at five, and I wore the same three or four dresses over and over until they grew soft and familiar. I could feel something dancing inside me, all day long. It was my first barelegged summer since I was a girl, and I almost gave up on shoes. Mine had never fitted me, quite. Then Michael brought back for me and for Steph some espadrilles that he had seen on sale at the supermarket, which turned out to be just the thing. They were such a success he bought us several more pairs, all in different colours. Our feet were as happy as the rest of us.
One day when they were finishing breakfast Michael said, ‘Am I the only one who’s noticed? We’re all bigger.’
He looked round the table. ‘Haven’t you noticed it? We’re bigger.’
They always had breakfast late. They preferred to wait until Steph had been to Sally’s and returned with Charlie, by which time they were all hungry. Jean’s breakfasts had resumed their original lavishness. It did not matter that they seldom got round to doing anything else before about half past eleven; the days were theirs to spend as they chose. Steph smiled her sleepy smile, and nodded without speaking. She was sitting with Charlie, who had fallen asleep with his mouth open against her skin.
‘Speak for yourself,’ Jean said. ‘I may have filled out, a little. Cheek.’
‘No, I mean bigger. Not fatter, just bigger. In every way. As people.’
Steph sighed, shifted Charlie and buttoned herself back into her clothes. She didn’t really understand or care. She had some news for them, but she was enjoying, for the moment, having it all to herself. The pleasure of giving it could wait a little while, and anyway, she liked listening to them talk. They were always talking, these days. They just were words people, Jean and Michael, and really, she was not, never had been. What was different was that she no longer felt inadequate about it.
‘All right, I have put on a little weight,’ Jean said, complacently, ‘I suppose.’ She fitted well inside her clothes, now. ‘Is that what you mean? Isn’t that all it is?’
‘No, we’re bigger in every way.’
‘Not taller.’ That was impossible. Yet Jean began to wonder if he could be right. She liked the earnestness with which Michael would explain new things to her. She did not always succeed in seeing things differently, but she made a point of being receptive to all his ideas.
‘I mean,’ Michael said, ‘we take up the space more. Not that we take up more space.’ Jean and Steph raised their eyebrows at each other. ‘Don’t you see? We displace the space more, we breathe more air, we take more of everything, we’re more solid, we’re as solid… as,’ he waved one hand around vaguely, ‘as everything else here.’
Steph laughed. She laughed a lot, now. Charlie stirred and groaned, decided that the noise was familiar, and settled.
Michael looked at her. ‘See? That’s part of it. All that sound you make. It’s because we’re not just here, it’s because we’re in it.’ He gestured round the kitchen with both arms. ‘It’s like we’ve entered the walls. We’re so big we’re in the walls. Don’t you know what I mean?’
He hardly did himself, and perhaps it was asking too much for them to grasp it. Perhaps, he thought, it was impossible to understand unless you had first of all lived in Beth’s house in Swindon. Not that there had been anything wrong with it, certainly nothing that Michael had been able to explain at the time, and barely could now. Beth and Barry were proud of it; they had bought the house brand new, they told him, on the drive there from the children’s hospital. Michael had sat in the back of the car not really paying attention, because he was busy trying to get used to Beth in ordinary clothes. He had only ever seen her in her uniform and had somehow imagined that was the only thing she wore. In the slacks and jumper she had on now she did not seem quite the same person, although she chatted as before; even her hair did not seem properly her own. Michael sat watching the back of her capless head, feeling jaded and dismayed. Their house, they said, was on such a friendly estate. People’s doors were always open. You could see green fields from it, in fact the estate itself was built on a hillside, and you could even see it from the motorway. When Barry pointed it out (’See up there? That’s home from now on, son,’ he had said, and Beth turned in her seat with brimming eyes and squeezed Michael’s knee) Michael looked and saw half a dozen broken rows of semi-detached houses stretching horizontally across the landscape. In the distance they looked tiny, like dislocated, uncoupled container wagons from a derailed train, just like the toy ones from the fancy set that the boy in hospital had been given by his parents.