Mr. Wright has had to go off to a meeting, so I am coming home early today. It’s pouring rain when I leave the tube station and I get drenched as I walk home. I see Kasia looking for me out of the window. Seconds later she greets me, smiling, at the front door. “Beata!” (It’s Polish for Beatrice.) As I think I told you, she has the bed to herself now and I have a futon in the sitting room and it feels absurdly cramped; my feet touch the wardrobe and my head, the door.
As I change into dry clothes, I think that today has been a good day. I’ve managed to keep my morning resolutions of not being afraid and intimidated. And when I felt faint and shivery and sick, I tried to ignore it and not let my body dominate my mind, and I think I succeeded pretty well. I didn’t get as far as finding something beautiful in the everyday, but maybe that’s just a step too far.
Now changed, I give Kasia her English lesson, which I do every day. I have a textbook for teaching Polish people English. The book groups words together and she learns a group before our lesson.
“Piękny,” I say, following the pronunciation instructions.
“Beautiful, lovely, gorgeous,” she replies.
“Brilliant.”
“Thank you, Beata,” she says, mock solemn. I try to hide how much I like her using her Polish name for me. “Ukochanie?” I continue.
“Love, adore, fond of, passionate.”
“Well done. Nienawisść?”
She’s silent. I am on the other side of the page now and the antonyms. I gave her the Polish word for hate. She shrugs. I try another, the Polish for unhappy, but she looks at me blankly.
At the beginning I got frustrated at the holes in her vocabulary, thinking it was childish that she refused to learn the negative words, a linguistic head-in-the-sand policy. But on the positive ones she’s forging ahead, even learning colloquialisms.
“How are you, Kasia?”
“Tip-top, Beata.” (She likes 1950s musicals.)
I’ve asked her to stay on with me after her baby’s born. Both Kasia and Amias are delighted. He’s offered us the flat rent free, till we “get on our feet again,” and somehow I’ll just have to look after her and her baby. Because I will get through this. It will all be okay.
After our lesson, I glance out of the window and only now notice the pots down the steps to your flat. They are all in flower, a host (a smallish host but a host nonetheless) of golden daffodils.
I ring Amias’s bell. He looks genuinely delighted to see me. I kiss him on the cheek. “The daffodils you planted—they’re flowering.”
Eight weeks before, I’d watched him planting the bulbs in snow-covered earth, and even with my lack of gardening knowledge, I knew they couldn’t survive. Amias smiles at me, enjoying my confusion. “You don’t need to sound quite so surprised.”
Like you, I see Amias regularly, sometimes for supper, sometimes just for a whiskey. I used to think you went out of charity.
“Did you pop some in, ready-potted, when I wasn’t looking?” I ask.
He roars with laughter; he’s got a very loud laugh for an old person, hasn’t he? Robust and strong.
“I poured some hot water in first, mixed it with the earth, then planted the bulbs. Things always grow better if you warm their soil up.”
I find the image comforting.
19
Wednesday
When I arrive at the CPS offices this morning, I discover other people also have diminutive hosts of daffodils growing, because Mr. Wright’s secretary is taking a bunch out of damp paper. Like Proust’s tea-soaked petites madeleines, the soggy paper around their stems pulls me sensuously backward to a sunny classroom and my bunch of home-picked daffodils on Mrs. Potter’s desk. For a moment I hold a thread to the past, back to when Leo was alive and Dad was with us and boarding school hadn’t cast its shadow over Mum’s goodnight kiss. But the thread frays to nothing as I hold it and it is replaced by a hardier, harsher memory five years later—when you brought a bunch of daffodils to Mrs. Potter, and I was upset because I didn’t have a teacher I wanted to bring flowers to anymore, and because I was off to boarding school where I suspected even if they had flowers, they wouldn’t let me pick them. And because everything had changed.
Mr. Wright comes in, his eyes red and streaming. “Don’t worry. Hay fever. Not infectious.”
As we go into his office, I feel sorry for his secretary, who even now must be trashing the happy beauty of her daffodils out of loving consideration for her boss.
He goes to the window. “Would you mind if I close it?”
“No, that’s fine.”
He’s clearly in a great deal of discomfort, and I’m glad I can focus on someone else’s maladies rather than my own; it makes me feel a little less self-centered.
“We’d got to Kasia coming to stay with you?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He smiles at me. “And I see that she’s still staying with you.”
He must have seen it in the paper. I was right about that photo of me, my arm around Kasia, being in all the newspapers.
“Yes. The next morning I played her the lullaby on the answering machine. But she just assumed it was a friend who’d been unknowingly but horribly tactless.”
“Did you tell her what you thought?”
“No, I didn’t want to upset her for no reason. She’d already told me, when I first met her, that she didn’t even know Tess was frightened, let alone who may have been frightening her. It was stupid of me to play her the lullaby.”
But if I’d seen her as fully my equal, would I have told her what I thought? Would I have wanted company in this, someone to share it with? But by the time I’d spent that night listening to her snore, by the time I’d woken her with a cup of tea and cooked her a decent breakfast, I’d decided my role was to look after her. Protect her.
“And then the answering machine tape ran on,” I continue. “There was a message from a woman called Hattie, whom I didn’t know, and hadn’t thought important. But Kasia recognized her, and told me she was at the ‘Mummies with Disasters Clinic’ with her and Tess. She assumed that Hattie had had her baby but didn’t expect her to call. She’s never been close to Hattie; it was Tess who always organized their get-togethers. She didn’t have a phone number for Hattie but she did have her address.”
I went to the address that Kasia had given me, which makes it sound easy, but without a car and a rudimentary knowledge of public transport, I found getting anywhere stressful and time-consuming. Kasia had stayed behind, too self-conscious about her bruised face to go out. She thought I was going to see one of your old friends out of sentiment and I didn’t correct her.
I arrived at a pretty house in Chiswick and felt a little awkward as I rang the bell. I hadn’t been able to phone ahead and wasn’t even sure whether Hattie would be there. A Filipina nanny, with a blond toddler in her arms, answered the door. She seemed very shy, not meeting my eye.
“Beatrice?” she asked.
I was perplexed about how she could know who I was.
She must have seen my confusion. “I’m Hattie, a friend of Tess’s. We met at her funeral, very briefly, shook hands.”
There had been a long line of people queuing to see me and Mum, a cruel parody of a wedding reception receiving line, all waiting their turn to say sorry—so many sorries, as if it were all their faults that you had died. I had just wanted it to be over with, not to be the cause of the queue, and didn’t have the emotional capacity to take in new names or faces.