Tideline (2 page)

I remember the marmalade again, but do nothing about it.

The phone rings, and I pick it up without thinking. It’s Greg. He launches straight in as if we’ve already been talking.

‘I’ve spoken to Burnett Shaws.’

‘Who?’

‘The estate agents. I want them to do an evaluation. It doesn’t tie us to anything. But I want to know figures, ballpark, it’ll help me choose what to view out here.’

I can’t speak. Jez has come back into the kitchen with Greg’s acoustic guitar. He bumps into the table as he sits and the guitar reverberates.

‘What’s that?’ Greg asks. ‘Have you got someone there?’

‘No. Nobody. But I’m not talking about this now. You know where I stand. You can’t make arrangements over my head.’

‘If we could have a sensible discussion about it I wouldn’t have to.’

I bite my lip. It’s always Greg’s last weapon, accusing me of irrationality.

I want to protest but he’s put the phone down.

‘Couldn’t find the album,’ Jez says. ‘But I spotted this guitar. Can I give it a go before I leave?’ His voice soothes away the tension aroused in me by Greg.

‘Of course. Of course you can.’ Nothing feels more right at this moment.

The next hour is my favourite this evening. Before the drink renders him incapable of leaving – even should he want to. We sit and talk and he plays. He tells me about Tim Buckley. How for
him playing music was ‘just like talking’.

‘It’s like that for me too,’ Jez says. ‘You teach people to express themselves with their voices. I play the guitar for the same reason.’

He’s good. I knew he’d be good. He plays something classical, John Williams maybe, something that ripples and lilts like water. The guitar’s an extension of him, the music
flows through his body from his soul. His fingers barely seem to move as he plucks the strings. His black hair falls over his face. When the drink begins to take effect and he can’t play any
more, he rests the guitar on the floor, the fingerboard against his thigh.

He tells me again how he loves my house. The river right outside. The smells! The light. The sounds. Listen! And we sit and identify the sounds I’ve come to take for granted. The
intermittent gush of waves against the wall, the clank and thumps from the old coaling pier, the throb of helicopters. Urban music, Jez calls it.

‘I want this kind of life,’ he says. ‘Music, wine, a house on the Thames.’

I, too, am a little drunk by now. I never want this evening to end.

‘It’s OK you know, Seb. You don’t have to go.’

‘Jez,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘My name. Jez, not Seb.’

It’s late when at last he stands up, and almost topples. Grabs the chair.

‘Shall I stay and keep you company?’ he slurs, and I almost blush.

‘I think,’ I say, in my grown-up mother’s voice, ‘it might be better if you got some sleep.’

He’s passed out almost before I can get him onto the old iron bed in the music room. I focus on his socks as I lie him down. There’s a hole in the big toe of the right one and I
think of a darning thing my mother had that was the shape of a mushroom and how she used to sit and mend our socks in the evenings, and I wonder whether anywhere in the world a darning mushroom
still exists. What an odd thought to have as I roll the socks off his feet, then tug his arms out of the sleeves of his hoodie.

I wonder if I should remove the jeans that hang so loose around his narrow pelvis, the muscles sloping in a golden triangle towards the buttons of his flies. He’d be more comfortable when
he woke. But I don’t want to humiliate him. So I leave them. I fill a glass of water in the shower room and place it on the bedside table so that he’ll know, if he wakes before I expect
him to, that I am caring for him.

Before I go out of the room I bend over and pass my nose from the top of his head with its whiff of shampoo, to his neck, where I can detect his own male scent, of cedar, salt. He wears a black
horn-shaped thing through one earlobe. His hair lies in liquid curls against his collarbone. I lift it gently so I may press my nose into the delicate, pale area beneath his ear. Here, I stop.

On his neck, beneath his hairline is the unmistakable red mark of a love bite. A hickey, Kit would call it. Bloody specks spread out from an angry central lesion. Alicia? Sucking his flesh into
her mouth until the capillaries burst and bleed. A red sore on his flawless skin. And suddenly I’m staring at a livid red gash left by a rope as it dug its teeth into another buttermilk
throat. For a few minutes I cannot look away.

At last I bend over and kiss the wound gently. ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper. ‘I’ll keep you safe, I promise.’

Then I pull the duvet over him, tuck it in a little at the edge, and go quietly out of the room.

Sonia

Living by the Thames you get used to its sounds and secrets. The lifeboats that race up and down, trailing wake behind them. You get used to the number of bodies dredged from
its depths. The way it flows one way, no return, though it fills and empties twice daily. To move away from it leaves you severed from the essence of things.

My time with Greg and Kit in the country was a dead time. I longed for the city, for its grime and anonymity. Away from London, I often woke at night, convinced that the river still flowed down
below me. I would take a while to orientate myself, even after we’d been there many years. To register that I was a grown woman with a husband and a child, out of town. Then reality snapped
into place, and acres of loss opened within me.

When we returned to the River House, five years ago, the furniture was covered in dust sheets. My mother believes in preserving things. She folds clothes into suitcases for the winter,
interleaved with layers of tissue paper. It’s from my mother that I inherited the tradition of marmalade making, conserving, pickling. I always felt those dust sheets, however, were less a
way of protecting her furniture, than a sign of her hidden reluctance to pass the house on to me.

Inheriting the house at my father’s behest seemed like a blessing. But no blessing comes without its cost. My mother needs me near her now, to fetch and carry, to listen and endure. But
she never really wanted me in her house, as she’s at pains to remind me.

It’s not quite light when I wake the next morning. There’s the
phut phut phut
of a launch on the river. I want to lie here and cherish this feeling. A kind of fullness. A completion.
It’s like the night after you give birth and stare at the baby you have brought into the world. It’s like the moment you know you both feel the same towards each other. Made more
precious, now you know how rare these instances are.

I hear footsteps along the alley as the first stallholders hurry towards the market. Soft grey light seeps round the edges of the curtains. I go to the window, pull them back. Outside, the tall
buildings on Canary Wharf are pale, the glass walls reflect the pearly sky that gives way to a peach glow where the sun rises beyond Blackwall. It’s very cold out there.

The smell from the river is sharp, that rich oily mud stench which means the tide is out. Its swag will be on show. New deliveries will lie exposed on the shore: caskets, tyres, bicycle wheels.
I know its regular imports, but there’ll be the unexpected, too. However, I have no time for beachcombing this morning. I pull on my kimono and go to look at him.

His face is paler in the early light of the music room and for a split second, I’m gripped by a fear that I may have overdone it. He mentioned asthma. Alcohol, I once read, can bring on an
attack. I bend closer, feel with relief his breath upon my cheek.

He doesn’t stir, so I pick up one of his hands. Observe the slender fingers, nails long enough to pluck the guitar. One has caught on something and is torn slightly. Pink skin on the pads
of his fingers like a child’s. No coarse dark hair on the back of his hands, just a few golden filigree threads which catch the light. On his forearm a raised blue vein. I run my finger along
it, watching the rise and fall of the blood as I push. Seb’s arm had this same vein, most prominent when he was exerting strength, as he grasped a painter that he’d thrown around a
mooring ring. As he hauled himself up the pilings. Or as his iron grip closed around my wrists.

I drop Jez’s arm and look at his face. He must have inherited his pale-brown skin from his French Algerian father. A square chin, turned up slightly, the stubble so soft, so slight, a
faint dusting of black specks beneath his skin. As I drag my lips over it I can barely feel it. I’m back with Seb. My nose, buried into his neck, smells the combination of smoke and male
perspiration for the first time. Feels the ridges and valleys of his body through his shirt.

When I’ve had my fill, I must continue as normal. My mother’s expecting her Saturday morning visit and will become difficult if I miss it. If I go now, I can be back here before Jez
wakes. He’s in a deep sleep and, if I know anything about teenagers, will stay that way for most of the morning. I gaze at him for another minute as he turns, resettles himself. Then,
reluctantly, I slip away.

Outside, the early morning sun is bright, though the air’s so cold it burns my throat as I breathe. Frost glints on the alley walls and I feel the crunch of ice
underfoot. Residue from the tide that must have been so high in the night it came over the footpath.

Only a week ago there was still snow on the ground. I caught a glimpse through the almshouse railings – a cluster of snowdrops that had come through a small circle of grass where the snow
had melted. The brilliant white of their bowed heads against the unexpected green took my breath away and I hurried home to find my camera. By the time I came out again the light had gone and the
next day the snow had turned to slush. I was afraid the loss of that image would pluck at my brain. It’s something I’ve got to guard against. Regrets burrowing in and feeding off
me.

My mother’s retirement home is a ten minute bus ride away. She moved here when she could no longer manage the River House, when her mind started to slip, her body to give up on her. I
hurry down the softly carpeted corridor trying not to inhale the mix of cooking aromas from the separate flats. Max, who visits his own mother and has become a kind of friend, appears from number
10. He waves a cheery good morning so I wave back. I sometimes wonder if Max thinks I’m single and would like to get to know me better. In some ways it’d be fun to flirt, but I have
Greg. My husband. Whatever that word means.

‘I brought you your paper, and some gin.’ I hand my mother a bag that also contains the incontinence pads I buy for her. It is a matter of delicacy that we never refer to these.

I press my lips briefly against her dandelion-fluff hair. That I should have to bend to kiss my own mother upsets me, this once capable woman who stood half a head taller than I do. She
doesn’t greet me when I step inside her flat, but turns her back to me and asks if I’ll have coffee. Then she starts on about the other residents.

‘They’ve started a film club in the lounge. But the things they choose. Such rubbish.’

‘Why don’t you make a suggestion yourself?’

‘They wouldn’t listen. I know, from the TV they prefer. They’d rather watch ballroom dancing than a decent drama.’

‘What about Oliver? He seems pleasant.’

‘Oh, he’s an old bore and so effeminate.’

I think that if she met a new man to share her life with, my mother might become more forgiving. That we might talk more as I imagine other mothers and daughters talk.

I settle into one of her chintz armchairs and let the sunlight from her French windows warm my lap, thaw my frozen lips. Mother works her way towards the sideboard where she’s set out cups
and saucers and a coffee percolator, one shrunken hand on the sofa back, the other against the wall to steady herself.

‘It’s early. You can’t have had breakfast. I’ve coffee but nothing else to offer you. Unless you want grape nuts. But I know you sneer at grape nuts.’

‘I’m fine, thank you. I’ll pick up something on my way home.’

‘Of course your father introduced me to Grape Nuts. He advised leaving them at least half an hour to soak in milk before eating.’

‘Yes. I remember.’

‘If I’d a proper-sized freezer as I did in the River House I could stock up on pastries. As it is I can offer you a Garibaldi. But that’s all.’

It’s time to change the subject.

‘New drugs mother?’

There’s a silver pillbox on the tray where she keeps her medication, one I haven’t seen before.

‘The doctor’s given me those for my sleep,’ she says. ‘The Co-codamol’s OK for the pain, but I have terrible nights.’

‘Yes. You said.’

‘You’ve no idea what it’s like to wake in the small hours. Not to be able to drift off again.’

I do know, of course. Those eternal nights when nothing will still the soul. They’ve come back lately, since Kit left and Greg spends so much time away. I lie and fret. I worry for you,
Mother, how I will manage your deterioration when there’s so little love to sustain us. I worry for Kit, out in the world. And anxiety grips me when I think that you will let Greg win and
take the River House from me.

My mother pours coffee, her back to me. I sense her shoulders stiffen. Her white perm bobs softly. I flinch. I know what’s coming.

‘I don’t sleep because I worry for the River House. The windows need replacing. The roof. And then there’s your voice consultancy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Greg can’t approve of those sessions you arrange in the house?’

‘Of course he approves. He helped me set it up! You know that.’

‘I don’t know what your father would have said. The comings and goings day and night. It isn’t the way to run a business, letting people poke about in your home.’

‘I’ve lost some clients in this recession in fact. The business may suffer.’

She’s coming back, the bone-china plate held so precariously in one hand that the biscuits are in danger of sliding to the floor. I get up to rescue them but she moves irritably aside. I
sit back down.