* * *
Kay went to pains to impress upon these visitors who threaded inexplicably in and out that she had a terribly important appointment with a young woman named Adelaide, who was astonishingly lovely and wore long flowing dresses in sepia tones. Adelaide had been entrusted with Daddy’s crucial work papers, which Kay was to deliver to her father before he went to the surgery tomorrow. Mummy was jealous of Adelaide, so Mummy had to be assured that there was nothing between Daddy and this poorly wisp of a girl, who was not long for this world anyway. Meanwhile, the nice old man seemed to have money problems, so they were all going on a trip. Kay loved to go on trips. The nice old man said she would like it where they were going, and Kay had no reason to believe otherwise. Kay liked it everywhere.
Oh, she experienced brief interludes of agitation. She’d quite an altercation with the nice old man, when she put her foot down that she was not leaving the house without her husband Cyril, who had obviously been kidnapped, perhaps even by the old man himself. But in time she accepted the geezer’s dubious assurances at face value (whilst resolving at first opportunity to ring the police). When she insisted that Hayley had to have her breakfast immediately or she’d be late for school, the nice old man promised on a stack of Bibles that he would drive their young daughter to the school himself, with a parental note if necessary to explain the girl’s tardiness.
Yet for the most part, the whole world of vexation had been miraculously neutralized, as former sources of annoyance converted to sources of merriment or absorption. Sitting for hours in a nearly stationary traffic jam was every bit as entertaining as whooshing along at seventy-five. She was as content to wait at a bus stop indefinitely as she was to get on if the bus arrived. She had defanged the eternal bugbear of “taxes” by neatly forgetting what exactly the word alluded to. On her every side, other people exploded with a host of complaints (she’d long ago stopped worrying about who they were; if they were so rude as to neglect to introduce themselves, that was their problem). They railed against telecom providers whose ignorant customer service personnel were all patchy English speakers in India, lamented the devastation of their pension funds due to some worldwide event to which Kay was under no obligation to attend, and forecasted Armageddon along a variety pack of vectors—climate change, mass migration, fresh water shortage, food insecurity, unsustainable sovereign debt—whilst for Kay these were mere sounds that came and went. The one certainty to which she cheerfully clung was that, whatever these whinge-bags were on about, it would eventually go away. Although it pleased her to spend a fair bit of time on the floor, her prevailing sensation was of floating overhead, looking down on all the little people and observing the paltriness of their supposed troubles. She felt very wise.
Kay was sometimes discombobulated, but the confusion passed, and who cared about being a bit at sixes and sevens anyway. Looking out the windows was a delight: so many people and shapes and cars and lights. The skies raced with clouds that formed faces, smiling as they passed by. And the inside of her head bulged with a fabulous grab bag of miscellany, like those big snarled bins in charity shops whose every item cost a quid. Suddenly that poofy green sofa in Rotherhithe would float across her consciousness like another cumulous cloud, and she would remember with a sly secretive grin what she and her husband had got up to on those pillows in the early days of their marriage. A funny little soap-dish box would loom in her mind pulsing with outsize powers, and the fact that for some reason the black box was always cold made it seem all the more excitingly sinister. She paraded before herself a sequence of her favourite frocks through the ages, as if putting on her own private fashion show—including an especially stylish dress with an off-centre, check-shaped collar in which she had waltzed into their first real home. Sometimes she imagined whisking up a roux for her famous cauliflower cheese or cutting lard into flour for a meat pie, and this whimsical style of cookery had the advantage of dirtying no dishes and never getting flour on your sleeves. There was sleep as well, of course, which afforded great sweeping vistas of Australian outback, gnarls of mangroves weaving like live snakes, swaying palm trees of the southernmost point of the continental United States, or the austere Buddhist temples in the mountains of Japan. She must have seen terribly much in her life to have stored such a boundless library of pictures that she could mix and match, though often the landscapes in her dreams were of her own contrivance—plunging with great chasms or rushing with mighty waters that she had never seen, even with all her journeys. Yet the mosaic of waking and the cinema of slumber tended to blend. A memory of the long flag-lined promenade of the Mall in the approach to Buckingham Palace melded indistinguishably with a faintly distorted facsimile of the boulevard in her sleep; the intermingling of confection and recollection didn’t trouble her in the slightest. It was all just one vast glorious canvas of colour, texture, horses, and big pompous buildings. This undulating montage was every bit as transfixing as the grandiose epics she and Cyril had seen in Leicester Square: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, which she could also project in eidetic sequences on the back of her skull. A young Arab’s heartbreaking sink into quicksand until only a hand remained. The gallop of the sled across snow-covered hills with red-cheeked Lara and a soaring soundtrack.
Other times she sang: “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!” or “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” Some
