‘Be careful you don’t trip,’ he says. ‘There’s a loose board in the floor there.’
Once inside Mrs Swann immediately produces the bag of Christmas presents that is the occasion for their visit. They are lavishly wrapped, the paper glossy and unmarked, the gold ribbon twirled into perfect ringlets. Her husband wrapped them. He is generous with the paper, as only a man can be, for he barely knows what it is he is wrapping. Mrs Swann bought the presents, alone. She left it to her husband to be generous with the paper: her own involvement is with what is inside.
Thomas tries to take the presents, and Mrs Swann discovers that she is reluctant to part with them. Her hands will not let go of the bag.
‘Where’s little one?’ she says, looking around her for Alexa.
‘She’s at a birthday party,’ Thomas says.
‘Oh no!’ cries Mrs Swann. She is astonished. Not once has she imagined this scene occurring without the presence of a child. It is like Mass occurring without a priest at the altar. It casts a dreadful, civilian greyness over everything. ‘Couldn’t she have missed it, just this once?’
Her husband puts a cautionary hand on her arm.
‘Selina,’ he says, ‘don’t get involved. The child has her own life to lead.’
She understands him: he is speaking to her in a language that underlies even her own consciousness, that is the more private and profound for the fact that over the years it has blotted out her native tongue, solitude.
‘Well,’ Thomas says, ‘only until four o’clock.’ He looks at his watch. ‘She should be back any minute.’
‘Oh,’ says Mrs Swann. She doesn’t care when Alexa is coming back. What she wanted was to have her here when she arrived. ‘Hello, Antonia,’ she adds, so that it sounds like an afterthought.
Antonia steps forward, receives a cool kiss on the cheek.
‘Hey, Mum,’ she says.
Her daughter is wearing black trousers, a black T-shirt, black shoes — all negative, like those things in space that can swallow you whole while taking up no room at all. She wears no make-up or jewellery. Her full, fleshcoloured mouth is provocative in its nakedness. Even as a teenager Antonia wore black. The daughters of Mrs Swann’s friends wore Laura Ashley prints with frilled collars, smart little pumps, mohair jerseys in pastel shades, while Antonia went around like a Greek widow in black. Someone once called her that to Mrs Swann’s face — your daughter, the Greek Widow — and there in the supermarket Mrs Swann felt the hot uprush of rage all fenced around with powerlessness, so that she went home bursting with it, with a boiling anger whose urgent need for discharge seemed to threaten a public indignity of the kind Mrs Swann had not experienced since childhood. She remembers it now, the feeling that she might be about to disgrace herself, a feeling so violent, so overpowering, that it led Mrs Swann to pity herself, to pity herself profoundly. And even afterwards, when she had found Antonia in her room and unleashed herself on her daughter’s black-clad form, when she had said and done things that seemed to mirror the disgrace and even, in moments, to become it, she could not feel other than a victim, hitting out in whatever way she could at her attacker.
Such scenes have characterised her relations with Antonia from the beginning: even on her first day of life, Mrs Swann remembers feeling very distinctly that she had lost something, and that it was Antonia who had stolen it from her. She remembers a phrase — codes of formality — that haunted her during Antonia’s babyhood, for the fact that she had already irrevocably violated them. The problem is that once broken, such boundaries are difficult to rebuild. She has tried, but they crumble at the slightest pressure. It would have been different if her husband had taken Antonia’s side. But he did not: Mrs Swann wouldn’t allow him to. Over the years she has often considered cutting free of this control and isolating herself in her anger; she has sensed, instinctively, that if her anger could be isolated it could be cured. But there is something deeper than her anger, something pre-existing, something original and authentic that is only revealed when her husband allies himself with Antonia. Mrs Swann fears it more than anything else. She takes one look at it and knows that there is no alternative — has never been nor ever will be any alternative — to her and her husband standing united against their daughter.
Now Antonia embraces her father there in the hall, in front of Mrs Swann. Her arms encircle him for a second too long; her narrow hips and pert little buttocks stare at Mrs Swann insolently.
‘Shall we go through?’ Mrs Swann says, imperatively. ‘I’d appreciate a cup of tea, if it isn’t too much to ask, after all those hours in the car.’
In the cramped sitting room, Thomas goes around clearing old newspapers off the chairs and picking up dirty cups and glasses. It is like the absence of Alexa, the fact that they haven’t tidied up or prepared for the Swanns’ visit: it makes the world seem grey, random, devoid of belief. Mrs Swann sits with her husband on the velvet sofa, which creaks and shudders under their combined weight.
‘Have you had this recovered?’ she says, fingering the mangy velvet arm.
Antonia shakes her head. ‘It’s the same as always.’
‘Is it? Oh. But the curtains are new,’ she says.
‘I had them made.’ Antonia is obviously pleased. ‘Don’t you think they’re fabulous? They’re antique silk.’
‘Are they?’ Mrs Swann is aggrieved by the curtains. There is something critical about them, something that smacks of personal rejection. ‘Why didn’t you say you wanted curtains? I’ve got boxes of old pairs I could have given you. You could have had them altered for next to nothing.’
Instantly she sees Antonia’s face close, close shut like a door.
‘I wanted green curtains,’ she says. ‘I wanted that particular colour.’
‘What a waste!’ says Mrs Swann. ‘When I think of all those curtains in the attic, all beautifully lined, with proper pelmets, just sitting there gathering dust —’
She thinks of the attic, the twilit space, with its freight of wastage and accomplishment. She pictures it, finding the box and getting it down, unfolding the heavy musty cloth as though it were a section of the past that could be redeemed, relived. It would be good to redeem some of that wastage. She imagines the curtains, her curtains, at Antonia’s window. On second thoughts, perhaps she wouldn’t like it after all.
There is a sound at the door, and a moment later Alexa comes in. At the sight of the Swanns her face lights up, cautiously.
‘Hello, Grandma,’ she says, coming closer.
Mrs Swann grasps her, receives her, pulls her unresisting form on to her lap. She is like a doll, or a teddy bear. Mrs Swann feels that she could tell her everything.
‘Silly Mummy,’ she says. ‘Silly Mummy getting curtains made, when Grandma has boxes of them at home.’
Alexa smiles anxiously, glances at her mother.
‘What curtains?’ she says.
‘All the curtains I’ve got in my attic. You remember my attic, don’t you? Well it’s full to bursting with curtains, all going to waste.’
‘Why don’t you use them?’ Alexa asks her.
‘Grandma can’t use them, darling. Grandma already has curtains in her house.’
Alexa considers it. ‘Why don’t you give them away to charity?’
Mrs Swann feels a faint vexation, a sense of entanglement. She remembers it from her own children, the feeling that a child who had come into the world pure and new, unmarked, had somehow become knotted up, full of snags and resistances. What she liked best was a baby, a clean sheet.
‘Grandma believes that family comes first. If everyone took care of their own family, there wouldn’t be any need for charity, would there?’