Her face was chalky, her lips painted red: she said, ‘She was our only, you see. One child only I might have.’ They pressed Karina’s hands, as if some imprint of their daughter might be left there. To me they just nodded, puzzled and bemused by so many young faces without names.
I would have liked to touch their elbows and say, at least the fox fur got out. Lynette would have liked that; she really would, you know.
I wake up, these days, some time after my husband has left for the train and the city. My house, my street, is eerily quiet; even when the schoolchildren are on holiday, they make a muffled festival of it, and the cries from their bicycles and skateboards are muted by the expensive distance between the houses and the landscaping of the far-sighted architects who have planted us out here among the pines.
And so, sitting by myself with my newspaper, nine o’clock in the morning, I become conscious of all the small noises of the house: the purr of the well-stocked freezer, the expansive tick of the long-case clock. Sometimes it occurs to me that I am hungry. I might boil an egg; I believe in protein now. I make some toast, and butter it thickly with the same type of Danish butter that I ate when I was a child, and which, when I was a student, I was ashamed to be unable to afford.
I put my meal on to a tray – with my small silver teapot, my china cup, my lemon slice – and carry it through to the dining-room, where I sit down with it in great state. The ‘dining-room’, I am aware, is a bourgeois invention; the upper classes (historically) and the lower classes (now, for all I know) preferred and prefer to do everything in an all-purpose room. Sleep, cry, write letters, make love . . . but that reminds me too much of the era of the Slimmer’s Disease.
I pluck out, as I go, a fresh pale linen table napkin, just for me; I am the one who will wash and iron it, but I have reached the stage in life when I am willing to serve myself.
My breakfast table is as far as a table can be from the french-polished object at which I toiled at my homework in my parents’ house, on those winter nights when it was too cold for me to be kept upstairs. It is a blond table, a bland table, a table which shows the great beauty of its natural wood, and my touch glides over it with a sensual assurance that I can never feel in the presence of another human being. I trace with my nail the lovely line of the wood’s exposed heart, its graceful curves like the fingerprints of those giants on whose shoulders we stand. I place my forefinger on the knots in the wood, those knots that, though they run against the grain, seem more satin-like, more glassy than the wood itself: I think of my life, and the lives of the women I knew, and I say, tapping softly, tapping decisively on the dark and swirling node, that is where we went wrong, just there, that is the very place.
But then in the dappled sunlight, filtered through conifers, the wood seems to dissolve beneath my fingers. The angles of the white room soften and melt around me; and the past runs like water through my hands.
