Sister

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.

“Piekny,” 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. Nienawissc?”

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.”