“What is it?”
She grabs my arm and leads me into the library as if an enormous birthday present awaits me there. Instead, an elderly woman is sitting on a wheel-back chair in the corner of the room, a glass of sherry in her hand. It’s a bit of a shock to see her, to see anyone, sitting in my house. The woman gets to her feet as we enter the room. I guess instantly who it is. I clasp the face of my wristwatch, twisting it in my fingers, trying to buy myself preparation time. Usually, for this sort of encounter, I would have required time to rehearse what to say, where to look and how to react. I’m so unused to meeting people these days. I’d like to flee and shut myself into my room upstairs, like a little girl. How could Vivien do this to me without warning? It’s not a new thing—she knows I’ve always avoided people. Even when I was younger, when I went to town and wanted a cup of tea I’d go to the hot drinks dispenser in the train station rather than the teashops on the high street. That way, it didn’t have to get personal.
“Ginny,” says Vivien, coming between us as if she were the umpire in a boxing ring. “I want you to meet Eileen.”
“Hello, Eileen,” I oblige, forcing myself to look up, to take in her small frame, her pure white hair, yellowing at the front, and the thick spectacles that magnify her eyes queerly. Between you and me, I’ve seen her many times before from my lookout, walking up or down the lane to church, waiting for the bus, posting a letter in the box in the rectory wall or visiting the woman at East Lodge on Tuesday afternoons. But she’s never seen me.
“Hello, Ginny,” she replies timidly, and it strikes me as peculiar that we’re meeting like this when we’ve been living less than half a mile from each other in a scantily populated countryside for a number of years now. Had we wanted to meet, we could easily have done so.
“Eileen lives in Willow Cottage, where her mum used to live,” Vivien says.
“I know,” I reply, and we spend a few moments sitting ourselves down in a sort of circular arrangement on three single chairs. I can see Eileen has begun feverishly to finger the glass in her hand, turning it round, searching for comfort in its golden charge. Vivien pours herself a drink, then offers one to me, but I don’t drink.
“Well, cheers,” she says.
“Cheers,” says Eileen hesitantly, and they hold up their glasses in front of me in honor of our enforced meeting. “It’s been a very long time, Ginny, but I’ve heard all about you.”
“You’ve heard about my work, then?” I ask. There wasn’t an awful lot else she could have heard about but the work I’d spent a lifetime achieving. Eileen looks to Vivien, as if she needs reassurance to answer me, the hand with the glass a little shaky. I find her nervousness strangely comforting. It’s making me relax.
“Her moth work,” Vivien says loudly, nodding at Eileen.
She must be a little deaf, I think, so I copy Vivien’s lead and speak slowly and emphatically. “Yes, I’m quite a well-known lepidopterist,” I say modestly, “not that I have much time for it anymore.” She doesn’t answer. “Or steady enough hands,” I add lightly. She’s staring at me strangely. “But you can never completely give up that sort of vocation. It’s in here,” I say, pulling a fist towards my heart and tapping it a couple of times, hoping that some sign language will help her understand the basics.
Eileen glances at Vivien again. “Yes, I’ve heard about your work,” she says uncertainly.
“Well, I had to keep up the family tradition.”
My initial nervousness has evaporated now. My lack of confidence when it comes to meeting people must stem partly from lack of practice and, once the initial bit is over, I’m surprised it feels so manageable.
“Top-up?” Vivien asks Eileen, indicating her glass.
“Please.” She accepts eagerly. It’s eleven-thirty in the morning.
For someone who started out by telling me how much she’d heard of my work and my reputation, Eileen now seems remarkably uninterested in discussing the subject. I sit there half listening as she and Vivien digress into a different genre of conversation to which I’ve nothing to add. I’m vaguely aware of them talking about how I might enjoy coming to church, and how long it takes Eileen to do the flowers each week. They talk about how much bigger the house seems nowadays, and then about her mother’s horse, Rebecca, which, having retired from fieldwork, still went on to live until twenty-three and was gentle enough to have anything on her back, including the cat, who often slept there.
I’m not at all interested. I’m staring at the marble fireplace I can see across the room, just to the left of Eileen’s shoulder, two thick columns of stippled gray surrounding the painted tiles, and a mantelpiece above, and I start to explore the wispy white crystal streaked through the darker gray. It reminds me of a section of neurons through an electron microscope, like the ones I’ve seen in scientific journals, with their long axons and dendrons reaching out to one another, trying to find a connection. While Vivien and Eileen talk of old age and the new cinema complex with a bowling alley in Crewkerne, I allow myself to go on a little journey through the fireplace’s nervous system, following the splayed out neurons and leaping over synaptic gaps like a neurotransmitter. They lament how bowling has changed because it always used to be played by the elderly on the village green and now it’s in the pubs, hijacked by the young. In the way that when you stare at patterns for long enough you can make them move about and change their form, I am trying to join up the maze of streaky lines within the marble, to mass them together into one dense brain, as if I were tying up the loose ends of different lengths of string. Infuriatingly, as soon as I join up several strands they start to untie and move off of their own accord, until the entire nervous system begins to unravel and I lose control of it. All of a sudden I’m aware of Vivien getting up from her chair.
“I’ll get you one,” she’s saying to Eileen, as she walks out of the room.
I look at Eileen and she meets my gaze. I’m not afraid of her being here anymore. We both know there’s nothing to say, that we were put here together against our better judgment, so we remain silent. She picks up her handbag from the floor beside her chair and rummages in it. Finally she pulls out a packet of Benson & Hedges and a small white lighter. She takes a cigarette, lights it with a couple of short, sharp puffs, then draws pleasurably from it in one lengthy inhalation. I’m amazed a frail body like hers holds such a powerful suck. She risks a glance at me. I’m watching her. I’m curious about the way she smokes, the way the smoke streams out of her nose and snakes upwards, swathing the front of her hair, staining it yellow. She takes the cigarette out of her mouth and studies the burning end intently, judging her satisfaction by the length of ash she’s created. She puts it back to her lips and draws again and I’m searching her face for clues to what she’s thinking or feeling, but I have no idea. She’s expressionless. Her blank features remind me of something, someone…
The picture on the card, of course. How could I forget it? A cartoon picture of a granny knitting in a chair. It’s from the card games I barely remember playing with Dr. Moyse when I was little. Then all the other cards come back to me in a rush of memory, pictures of a cartoon family in lots of different places: the girl in the bath playing with bubbles, Daddy flying an airplane, Grandpa swimming (or was he drowning?) in a river, the boy on a bike or balancing on an upturned bucket, Daddy smashing his fist on a table, Mummy behind a school desk, the girl in the jungle next to a tiger…
It was quite simple, really. I’ll tell you what you had to do. The idea was to guess what they were thinking by the expressions on their faces. But it wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds because the cards were purposely misleading. For example, the girl about to be ravaged by the tiger was scared in some, and in others quite happy. Daddy was banging his fist on the table sometimes in anger and at other times in delight. But it was the card with Granny sitting in a chair knitting that always stumped me. It was like the trick one, the joker in the pack. Is Granny happy or is Granny sad? Happy or sad? Happy or sad? A little of both, I’d always thought, a little of both. But she couldn’t be both. Dr. Moyse said she wasn’t allowed to be both. Well, it’s not like real life, is it? It’s just a game, I know, but it’s nothing like real life if I’m not allowed to mix Granny’s feelings even though they would be. A woman of great age with all her life behind her was bound to have contradictory feelings. But it always had to be one. You had to choose. Happy or sad?