Somewhere along the way, it went wrong.
“So, did you enjoy your little trip to the country?” Fifi asks her, as they draw into Paris. “Wasn’t it awkward taking Mary?”
“No. In fact, Mary was rather a hit. Everyone wanted to dance with her. My Uncle Stan was very taken.”
Vanessa tries not to think about the fart. She would rather die than tell Fifi that. And it wasn’t important, in the longer view. Bridges had been built, chasms crossed.
And, left on her own, while Fifi goes to see her family, in the tall, stuffy house where Fifi’s grandmother lived, Vanessa feels renewed, and hopeful. She sits down at the desk in the bedroom with her notebook. What she has learned will surely bear fruit.
But in fact, for some reason things go against her. That weekend there’s a miniature Indian summer. The thick heat of August returns, and clings. Most of the windows are impossible to open, the wood dried and twisted in an airless clinch, and when she finally attacks one with a knife, prising at the frame with fierce determination, the paint flakes off, and then the wood splinters, and she cuts her hand before she gives up. Small beige moths flutter out of tall cupboards like rags and tatters of exploded lace. The polished walnut swirls uneasily with faces. On the dressing-table that was once Fifi’s grandma’s, a cloudy cut-glass bowl of pink face powder sits uncovered, breathing at her. Vanessa feels she is inhaling human dust.
When she looks for respite at the walls, almost every centimetre is covered with photographs, framed and unframed, large and small, curled photographs of smiling children, proud parents, sprinting dogs, a crowded world of happy strangers that is slipping very slowly into the past. This family’s life seems like a long, sunlit picnic; they meet up in parks, in woods, in gardens, there are always at least half a dozen of them, and they dance and prance for the photographer, they hug each other and play leap-frog, they hold up small babies and exquisite toddlers, they ride donkeys or have swimming parties, cut big cakes or raise a diadem of glasses.
However, when Fifi briefly returns, it is to complain of being snubbed or excluded. “You know what they’re like, Parisians! They pretend they don’t understand a word, when as you know I am practically fluent, you heard me talking to that taxi-driver…And they expected me to pay for myself. In any case, the restaurant was filthy. And Tante Clothilde was rude about my mother. Now I see why she wanted to escape her family!”
When she leaves again, Vanessa stares at the walls. Those happy childish faces haunt her. Movies that have turned into still photos. Colour that is fading towards black-and-white, so she can never quite get to the reality of it, never find out if Fifi is right—
But it’s painfully different from her own lost life, locked up in that low, dark house in the village.
She thinks, it’s not that I’m envious, exactly. It is just that haunting sensation of other lives. We only live once. Has my life been all right? Have I really done my best for Justin? Did he have enough friends, enough happiness? Did we ever go for sunlit picnics? I wasn’t a great one for seaside holidays. I never let him keep a dog or a cat. I was an only child, so he has no cousins…
Their life seemed thin, empty, cold, compared to the frieze around these walls, the children feasting on life’s banquet.
Vanessa is crushed and stifled by ghosts. They brush at her consciousness like bruised moth-wings as she tuts and sweats in the warm soft heat, writing, or not writing, because the pen moves slowly, and she starts to imagine she hears childish voices, a high silver humming that torments her ear, but when it finally drives her out into the kitchen she realises it is just something electric, but she still cannot find it to switch it off, so it goes on vibrating like a thousand crickets as the sky outside the shutters turns indigo, a thousand insects or a swarm of lost children, the ghosts who should have played with Justin.
I should have played with him more, she thinks. I shouldn’t have handed him over to Mary. But I had to work to pay the mortgage. I still have to work to keep my son.
She stays there, grimly. She is a professional. “Bums on seats,” she always says to her classes. “If you sit there long enough, the writing will come.” But she sits there, solidly, and nothing happens. Outside the window, Paris calls to her, grey and silver, infinitely delectable, singing come on, you are still young, dance with me, dance, Vanessa —
But Vanessa closes her ears, and sighs, and makes another wretched cup of instant coffee, though outside the doors there are glorious cremes, in wonderful cafes, and kir, and frites. She will not give in. She can sit this out. Like a terrier, she digs in, and waits.
On their last evening, Fifi returns upset. “Today she did actually recognise me, Grandmaman, and she was sweet…But now Grandpa is dead, she will never come home. She thinks she will, she talks as if she’s going to, but her daughter Jeanne said to me it’s impossible, the stairs are too dangerous, she can’t live alone…So tell me, what is the point of all this? All the books and pictures and music and photos? All the objets she’s chosen with such exquisite taste? Just to end up in some wretched almshouse. By the way, darling, how has your writing gone? Why didn’t you go off and see the Louvre?”
“Oh you know, a writer needs time on her own.”
But the journey back is rather subdued. They agree that amassing possessions is pointless. Fifi makes a note of this in her expensive new palmtop, whose merits she then explains to Vanessa. Vanessa declares she is going to have a clear-out. She sits and lists things to do in her notebook, the one in which she had planned to write. But while Mary is there, she may as well make use of her. Together they can really make a difference. Mary can hardly say she is busy—
Vanessa only half-knows she is fending off depression. “Kissy kissy kissy,” they say at Waterloo, but Fifi feels Vanessa hasn’t been supportive, and Vanessa is restless and frustrated.
It isn’t so easy, facing up to the past. Tomorrow she has to go back to teaching. The precious empty week is gone.
47
She comes home in a black taxi at three pm. The driver complains about immigrants, and they have the mandatory argument. The fare of twenty-five pounds is outrageous. She walks even faster than usual up the path, bumping her suitcase along the concrete. She rings the bell, but they’re too lazy to answer, so she drags her keys out of the bottom of her handbag and jerks them irritably into the keyhole.
“Mary!” she shouts as she comes in through the door. “Justin! Where is everybody?”
In fact, she finds Mary out at the back, standing on the lawn, wearing a winter coat of Vanessa’s, which blows open to show the annoying blue nightdress that Anya had found in Justin’s room. “Hallo, Vanessa.” She seems friendly, but startled. “I thought you were not coming back until this evening. Sorry, I have put your coat on.”
“That’s quite all right,” Vanessa says, but she can’t quite get rid of the feeling that Mary isn’t totally glad she is back early. (She’s right: Mary had been planning to call Libya on Vanessa’s phone.) “That is rather a smart coat for the garden, Mary. Why don’t you borrow my anorak?” Or else put more of your own clothes on, she thinks to herself, but does not say it.
“I shall make you a cup of tea, Vanessa,” Mary Tendo says, with a queenly smile.
On the way back in, Vanessa pauses and takes a proper look at the garden. She is dismayed to see that a lot of it is bare. It is certainly tidy, but where are her peonies? What has happened to half her roses? Her heart sinks as she realises. Besides, there are sticks all over the place, thin bamboo sticks at odd angles which she supposes must mark new plants. Some of them project from the fence like spines. She pulls one out: it is oddly barbed. It looks familiar, but she can’t take it in. It almost looks like a kind of arrow. This must be a technique of the Ugandan farmer. Or else Mary has been murdering squirrels.