‘Let them be happy,’ he says gently. ‘Give them their happiness.’
She ponders it. In the evenings when her shift is over she often goes to Stefan’s flat, a small flat on a busy street near the hospital. She sleeps in his bed, beside his body that is like a long white root, firm and forked. He sucks her large breasts in the darkness, while cars roar along the road outside. Is it normality they lack? For her these nights are abstract and solitary, tiny, like a seed from which something great and branching might grow. The seed gives no sign of what that thing will be. It is silent in itself. It has no connection to anything else, just the silent mystery of its future locked inside it.
But Stefan is right, in a way. It is hard to be sure that it is each other they really want.
‘The people I live with look perfectly normal. But they are not normal,’ she says. ‘They are not a normal family. Maybe it isn’t so easy to be normal.’
‘Why?’ he says. He is curious. ‘How are they not normal?’
‘I’ve told you about them,’ she says. It is true that her conversations with Stefan are repetitious. Perhaps this is what happens when you live on an island. ‘All I’m saying is that just to be a normal man and woman isn’t so easy.’
Lately, she has been watching Thomas and Tonie. It is her relationship with Stefan that has caused her to become aware of them: now that she has love, she is more interested in the sorts of love other people have. Before, she could find no frame of reference for Thomas and Tonie. They seemed both polymorphous and somehow null. Sometimes they were like brother and sister, at other times like old people imitating young ones. There was something iconic about them, something representative and wooden in the way they kissed or touched. But now she sees that they are real. She sees that they are serving the form of love as people used to serve their gods. She sees that love is as rigid and as invisible as a god, to whom over time people grow wooden and automatic in their obeisances. Yet it does not occur to them to deny it, this god of love. She wonders whether that constricted, invisible life is what Stefan means by normality.
‘I will support you,’ Stefan says, folding his arms across his chest magnificently. ‘If you want to have a child, that is all right. I will support you.’
‘I don’t ever want to have a child,’ Olga says.
She has had a child already. It was baptised before she gave it away: her mother insisted. Her sister’s boyfriend was the father. They all came to the baptism and stood around the font in smart clothes.
‘I guess it’s easier that way,’ Stefan admits.
‘Maybe we will always be outsiders,’ Olga says. ‘Maybe that won’t change.’
She thinks Stefan should know, that this safety can turn to imprisonment. When she hears Thomas playing the piano she thinks of a bird singing in its cage, lamenting in its safety. Yet she herself would like a cage. She would like a way of keeping the others out.
She looks at her watch. ‘We should go home,’ she says.
He rises. Already he has become her home. It doesn’t matter which room they are in, which country. Out in the street he lays his arm around her shoulders. They walk towards his flat. She thinks of her little room in Montague Street, the nights she spent alone there, innocent in her single bed. She has begun to think of those nights fondly. She recreates them in her mind. She remembers them, with rainbow-coloured nostalgia.
XXVIII
HOWARD [upstairs]: Claude! Claude, are you there?
CLAUDIA [downstairs]: What?
HOWARD: Claude!
CLAUDIA: What is it?
HOWARD: Claude, where are my deck shoes? They’re not in the place they normally are.
CLAUDIA: I’m on the phone.
HOWARD: They’re where?
CLAUDIA: I said I’m on the phone! I’m on the phone to Juliet. [To Juliet] Sorry.
JULIET: That’s all right.
CLAUDIA: It’s just Howard wanting his deck shoes. You know what it’s like when he starts looking for something. He starts taking everything out of the cupboards. We’re like the regional office, being visited by the chief executive. I feel I’m being audited.
JULIET: Why does he want his deck shoes? Are you going away somewhere?
CLAUDIA: Just Cornwall for the weekend.
JULIET: What, now?
CLAUDIA [surprised]: Yes.
JULIET: But it’s ten o’clock at night!
CLAUDIA: Is it?
JULIET: Ten past ten.
CLAUDIA: It can’t be! Ten o’clock? That’s ridiculous — the children ought to be in bed!
JULIET: You’re not taking them with you, are you?
CLAUDIA: Of course we are — we can’t put them into kennels, like the dog! They’re doing a weekend sailing course.
JULIET: But you won’t get there until two in the morning! How are you going to get them up to do a sailing course?
[Silence]
CLAUDIA: Well, I suppose they’ll sleep a bit in the car.
[Silence]
JULIET: I ought to let you go, in that case.
CLAUDIA: But I feel I haven’t heard anything about you!
JULIET: Oh well. Another time.
CLAUDIA: Soon, I promise.
JULIET: Bye then.
CLAUDIA: Bye. Howard?
HOWARD: Did you find them?
CLAUDIA: Howard, it’s ten o’clock! It’s far too late to go. The children ought to be in bed!
HOWARD: But I only got back from work at nine, Claude.
CLAUDIA: I thought you were going to come back early so that we could go!
HOWARD: I got back at nine. I came back as soon as I could.
CLAUDIA: Well, you could have told me.
HOWARD: I thought you knew. You usually know what time it is.
CLAUDIA: The children should be asleep. They probably are asleep. Have you checked?
LOTTIE: We’re not asleep.
CLAUDIA: This is ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous! You should have heard Juliet on the phone when I said we were setting off tonight. She obviously thought we were completely mad!
HOWARD: Your sister thinks everyone is completely mad, darling. With the notable exception of herself.
CLAUDIA: Don’t be horrible, Howard.
HOWARD: Of course Juliet thinks ten o’clock is late. She’s in bed at ten o’clock. She’s in bed in her wimple, like a nun.
CLAUDIA: She wasn’t in bed. She was talking to me.
LEWIS [from his room]: She can be in bed and talk to you at the same time. She could even be asleep and talk to you. She might actually have been hypnotised.
CLAUDIA: She obviously thinks it’s me who’s driving everyone into the ground and forgetting I’ve got a family, including a child of six whose growth will be restricted because nobody could be organised enough to put her to bed –
LOTTIE: Sometimes I think I’d like to be a nun.
CLAUDIA: — and I can’t say, look, it isn’t me, can I? I can’t tell her it’s because some people are completely selfish and think only of themselves. It’s a sort of joke [laughs], a joke, when I could have spent all day in my studio working, all day and all evening too, and still have been in exactly the same position as I am now!
HOWARD: Well, you could have, Claude. That’s a true statement of the position, isn’t it?
CLAUDIA: What is?
HOWARD: That you could have spent the day working, without any loss to the family.
[Silence]
CLAUDIA: Just like you do.
HOWARD: I suppose so. I don’t know. I’m only repeating what you said yourself.