Tideline (16 page)

Greg says, ‘We weren’t going to discuss this until later.’

Kit says, ‘I know, Dad. Sorry. But did you see the local paper tonight? Harry was shocked. Armed burglaries. Perfectly innocent people being mugged, there was even a shooting, all in a
week! If nothing else that’s a good reason to move. I just want Mum to think about it.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted, as you know,’ says Greg.

‘It’s two against one, Mum!’ Kit smiles brightly.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘Don’t bring this up now.’

Kit turns to Harry. ‘Dad’s seen a fabulous place in Geneva.’

I look at Kit. What’s she playing at?

‘I know. You said your folks were thinking of moving out there,’ says Harry.

‘Imagine the skiing! Mum, I can’t believe you won’t even give it a thought.’

I purse my lips. It seems all of them, Greg, Kit, even my mother have been talking. Planning. Scheming. Going ahead in spite of my feelings. ‘What place have you seen, Greg? This is the
first I’ve heard of it.’

‘I did a bit of preliminary research. And honestly Sonia, if you saw some of these places . . . I’m certain you’d come round to it. Your mother thinks it’s a good idea.
I’ve got some details in fact, to show you later.’

‘You discussed this with my mother, before consulting me?’

There’s a pause. Harry wipes his mouth with his napkin and shifts awkwardly in his chair.

Then Greg says, ‘Your mother takes an interest. You know she does.’

‘Who’s going to visit her, do her food order, take her the things she needs when I live in Geneva?’

Kit and Greg look at each other again, as if they have been arranging all this for weeks.

‘She’s coming with us, of course,’ says Kit. ‘We wouldn’t leave Grandma behind. Dad’s seen somewhere with a granny flat and . . .’

I fill up my wine glass and rest my forehead on my hand. There’s another tense silence.

Then Kit says, ‘Anyway, can I take Harry up to the music room? Can we be excused until pudding?’

Before I speak Greg winks at Harry and says, ‘The keyboard is mine in fact. I’m thrilled that a friend of Kit’s wants to play it.’

Kit smiles at her father, squeezes his hand.

‘Is that OK, Mum?’ she asks anxiously.

‘Of course,’ I say, trying to smile too. ‘It wants using. Greg hardly ever plays these days.’

‘What was that supposed to mean?’ Greg asks, when Kit and Harry have left the room. I blink in surprise.

‘It wasn’t supposed to mean anything,’ I say. ‘You don’t often play these days. You’re not often here.’

‘It was a dig,’ he says. ‘If you’ve got a problem with my being away more, why don’t you say so?’

‘I don’t have a problem with it.’

‘Then why carry on in this passive-aggressive manner?’

‘Passive-aggressive?’

‘What would you call it?’

‘Not passive-aggressive, Greg, that’s unfair. I was simply stating a fact. You don’t play as often as you used to. You aren’t here as much these days.’

He gives me that look again, from beneath a lowered eyebrow, as if he’s assessing whether his early diagnosis was correct.

‘What is it, Sonia?’ he says at last. ‘First the wine. Then all these snide remarks about my not playing any more. Was the wine a way of getting at me too?’

‘Oh God, the wine again. Please drop it, it was an oversight on my part and I apologize. We’ll find another way to celebrate Kit’s birthday. I’ll buy vintage champagne.
It’s not as if we’re short of money these days.’

‘How many times . . . I’m happy to stop the lecturing. I’d do it for you if you wanted me to. You just have to say.’

‘Do you think your being at home more would be such a good idea?’ I ask. ‘The way we seem determined to misunderstand each other these days?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘You’re right, perhaps it wouldn’t.’

I get up, clear away the plates, scrape leftovers into the bin.

Kit comes in and looks at us sullenly.

‘What’s up, Beanie?’ Greg asks, holding his arms out. She walks into them, lets him hold her.

‘You two,’ she says. ‘I thought you got on better now I’ve left home.’

‘Oh, Kit,’ I say. ‘We never got on that badly, did we? While you were here?’

‘You bickered all the time. I always thought it was my fault. That you’d be OK now I’ve gone.’

‘Honey,’ says Greg. ‘All parents bicker. It has nothing to do with you. How can you think that? We both love you to bits. Don’t we, Sonia?’

‘Of course.’

‘And we love each other.’ He looks at me and smiles, so I smile back.

‘But you won’t agree about the move?’

She says ‘the move’ as if it is a definite thing, as if they have already gone ahead with it. I open my mouth but Greg interrupts.

‘It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, honey.’

‘So,’ I say. ‘Harry. It seems quite . . . serious?’

She shrugs. ‘We get on OK. Oh, I told Harry about your acoustic guitar, the one you got in Spain, Dad. But I couldn’t find it? Did you get rid of it?’

I can feel Greg’s eyes trying to catch mine. I busy myself with pudding.

‘Shall we have some Tarte au Citron? It’s from Rhodes. Oh, and Kit, I got you some Princess Cake.’

She sidles over to me. I slip my arm around her and something seems, momentarily, to slide away, as if a layer of me is shed. I catch a glimpse of the mother-me I was remembering earlier, who
for a while was content.

After Kit’s eaten her cake she comes back to me at the sink. I’m scrubbing around the burnt bits of the roasting tin with a Brillo pad. But I’m thinking of Jez again, wondering
how he is. Thinking of him makes me anxious. He’s out of my reach, and it isn’t as it should be. He should be warm in the music room. Things have got out of hand. Something that should
be precious and exquisite seems to be slipping out of my control.

‘Do you remember that summer?’ I say to Kit. She’s drying the pans that I’ve washed, the ones that don’t go in the dishwasher. ‘The one when everything
festered. It was really muggy and damp. All those East Anglian crops just rotted in the soil, and everything stank. There were terrible mosquitoes. The cats got fleas. You caught head
lice.’

‘Mum! Why’re you talking about that? Head lice . . . yuck.’

‘Hey! And you’re a medical student.’

‘Yeah but you can keep the parasites for someone else. Not my thing I’m afraid!’

‘Anyway. There was a field of cabbages over the road and the leaves went mouldy. The stench was appalling! I thought there must be a curse on the land. Everything that should’ve been
ripe and fertile turned rancid and sickly. Then we became ill too and spent a week or more in bed fighting off a virus.’

‘I don’t remember,’ Kit says.

‘No. I suppose you were only about six.’

‘Anyway, why drag up that summer? There were plenty of good ones. When the trees were all covered in May blossom. Remember the cow parsley along the hedgerows? And the cornflowers in the
garden in June? God, I miss East Anglia so much sometimes. You could feel the seasons change. You just don’t get that in cities.’

Of course, for Kit, the country was her home. Her first forays into the world happened under massive skies and amongst spreading fields of poppies. The first images on her fresh baby retinas
were of white cloud shapes against blue, green light filter-ing through canopies of chestnut leaves. Those first impressions, that are made before we are even conscious that we can see, stay with
us, imprinted somewhere on our memories. They form our true image of home.

My first images were the river and its mud, the bones and smooth chalk stones washed up on the beach, clay pipes and discarded car parts and driftwood. Ropes and chains draped in dank weed.
Lowering grey skies only just glimpsed above the towering wall of the power station and its dark monolithic chimneys. The steel coaling pier reaching a clanking brown arm out over the water. Kit
never experienced East Anglia as I did, as an exile, even at its most radiant.

And why indeed am I talking about that one ugly summer? Why do I want to turn her good memories into something murky, best left forgotten?

‘You’re quite right,’ I say, wiping the surface with the dishcloth and putting on the espresso machine.

‘Treasure your good memories. Please darling. Hold them close to your heart. It’s very important.’

Later, when Kit and Harry have gone up to bed, Greg comes back into the kitchen and puts some guitar music on the CD player. It’s John Williams. My heart lurches. He sits
down opposite me at the table on the bench, pours us each a large glass of cognac, leans across and takes my hand in his. He smiles a beseeching smile through pale older-man lips. His stubble is
grey. His eyebrows, nostrils, and ears have long hairs growing out of them. Under his skin is a web of tiny red broken veins. He squeezes my hand.

‘Sorry about earlier,’ he says.

‘What? What’s there to be sorry about?’

‘About accusing you of being passive-aggressive. It wasn’t on.’

‘It’s OK,’ I say, sighing. I’ve withdrawn my hand.

‘Come and sit beside me?’

I move around to his side of the table and sit next to him on the bench. He puts his arm around me and I can smell coffee and old wool. It’s not unpleasant; it’s not that I find it
repellent when we sit together. It’s familiar. It’s accompanied me through the last twenty-five years of my life, it’s almost as much a part of me as the smell of the River House,
which you don’t notice until you’ve been away from it for a while.

He pulls me towards him and though I resist, he leans over and starts to kiss me on the lips.

I never actively enjoyed kissing Greg, but kissing does not even seem appropriate now we are over forty. Why is this? Do all married couples feel awkward trying to kiss when they get older? I do
try. I open my mouth a little bit and he pokes his tongue between my teeth. And it feels like a tongue between my teeth. It doesn’t feel like a thing to abandon myself to. It does nothing. I
can taste the cognac, and the faint residue of lemon tart. I’m afraid I’m going to gag. I push him away.

‘Sonia, I’m not having an affair if that’s what you think. That’s not why I’ve taken on all this lecturing. I promise.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think you were.’

‘I just sometimes feel you don’t want me with you.’

‘That’s nonsense!’ I say. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘Well, look at us. We haven’t slept together for three months now. I mean properly sleep together, not just share the same bed.’

‘Fuck, you mean.’

‘Well if you want to use that word. I’d rather say
make love
.’

‘I’m just clarifying what we’re talking about here.’

‘OK. We’re talking about sex, Sonia. Three months. And before that, how long? Six? Eight?’

‘Yes, but we’re not the kind of couple who spends their every waking moment copulating. We never were. Nothing’s changed, Greg. This isn’t a marriage of grand
passions.’

‘Not on your part, no.’

‘What?’

‘I mean, it’s not for want of trying on my part. I want us to . . . have more sex than we do. I still find you desirable, Sonia.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Still? Am I supposed to be past it at forty-four?’

‘OK. OK. Sorry. I shouldn’t have used the word
still
. I was talking about the fact we’ve been together for a long time. I know we’ve had our rough patches, but I thought
things were better recently. Since Kit’s grown up. I haven’t tired of you. Some husbands . . . God, Sonia, some guys I know, they’re fed up to the back teeth with the women they
married and are having affairs left, right and centre. But that’s not for me. You’re the one. Always have been. Always will be. It’s why I want us to move. Be together more often.
In a place that is ours. Not one that really belongs to your parents. Can’t you consider it, Sonia? Think of it. Geneva. Clean air. Mountains.’

Why won’t he give up?

‘Come to bed?’

Later, I’m woken in the night by visions of Jez skeletal, his flesh gone yellow and withered. There’s a stench of rotting cabbages, flies and lice crawl over him,
eating into his once-flawless flesh. I have to get out of bed, leaving Greg’s contented, post-coital snoring mound under the covers. I pull on my kimono and am about to turn and climb up the
stairs to the music room when I remember with a jolt that he’s not there. I go downstairs instead. I put my long wool coat over my night clothes and pull on my boots. Then I turn the handle
of the hall door and slip quietly out into the night.

Sonia

He stares wide-eyed at me. He won’t speak.

‘Is this the only way you can think of, to show me you’re upset I’ve put you in here?’ I ask. He won’t reply.

‘I didn’t want to do it, believe me. But I’ve got people in the house who won’t be happy you’re staying. I had to hide you for your own good.’

I’ve lit a candle and am looking at him by its wavering light. I’m dismayed. Something’s changed. Jez’s face is white and pasty looking, as it was in my dream. His skin
is faintly moist. I feel a rush of anger and I am not even sure who it’s for. Jez, for losing his vitality? Greg for coming back and forcing me to do this to him? Or for someone –
something – else?

I sit on the bed and pour Jez some water and offer it to him but he turns his head aside and refuses to drink it. It’s the first time, since Sunday, that he’s been so
uncooperative.

‘Jez, we both dislike this situation, but we have to make do. It won’t be for long. I promise. Please eat. Here. I’ve bought you some cake from Rhodes. There’s a choice
in fact, Princess Cake or Tarte au Citron.’

He takes a deep breath and spits at me, not once, but again and again. It’s so unexpected and so violent I have no time to duck.

Saliva runs down my cheek. I wipe it off with the sleeve of my coat.

‘That wasn’t necessary,’ I say. ‘I’ve come out here in the middle of the night to make sure you’re OK, not cold or frightened. That’s the only reason
I’m here Jez, to look after you. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.’

He doesn’t reply.