The Little Red Chairs (26 page)

‘You may have wondered,’ he began, ‘seeing that there are still a few of my wife’s belongings in cupboards, her raincoat and those lavender sachets that she hung everywhere. We had a child that was stillborn. She blamed herself. It gutted her. Wouldn’t let go. She held onto the creature for hours, willing it to breathe, holding a mirror for it to haw on. She would have named it Gabriel. When she came home from the hospital, the trouble began. Life was an endless mourning. She did nothing but sit and stare. I would come home from work after seven – I taught in the college at that time – and she was already in her pyjamas, prepared for bed, and she would merely look up and acknowledge me and I thanked God if she smiled. I knew she would have spent her day, or a great part of it, at the computer, studying foetuses and stillborn babies, all abnormalities relating to the ovaries. “Annie, Annie.” I might as well have been calling to the wall. I still loved her, but I wanted the old Annie back, the girl I courted, the girl that made hotpot and apple strudel, the girl that would meet me halfway up the road if we’d had a bit of exciting news, such as planning permission approval for that shed at the end of the garden.

‘Eventually, the time came when the doctor said she would benefit from a spell in a nuthouse, not that he used that word. She needed to get away, a change of milieu, sea air, sedation, all that gab. After a big search, a place was found in lovely countryside in Dorset and one Monday we drove there. It was like all those places with gates and an avenue up to it, but the grandeur and the friendliness stopped at the front door, where it had a
rather functional appearance. A little maid admitted us, gave a flabbergasted start with “Oh Jesus,” genuflected more than once and repeatedly hit a brass bell that was on the table. It could be heard in Timbuktu. Annie squeezed my hand, like a child going back to boarding school.

‘I used to go and see her every second weekend. We’d walk in the grounds, never without patients tagging along, because she was so popular. So it was jabber-jabber-jabber, one man, with a fishing rod, casting his line, a hook that would take the eye out of you. He professed to be a confidant of Charles Darwin, before Darwin made his theories known to the world. In my fairly elementary knowledge of loony people, it is always a king, a queen or a potentate they aspire to be, never Joe Bloggs.

‘Annie and I rarely talked about her coming home, or rather she kept postponing it. It was something to do with the room, the room you are in now. She couldn’t face it. The expense was considerable, but I had a vintage Railton that I sold and for which I got a good sum. There is something I must emphasise here, in case I have painted a bilious picture of my wife. She was one of the most generous and giving creatures alive. She would not have wanted me to sell it. One day I turned up and she was effervescent. It was raining and we were in the garden, rain slopping into the urns and the asters in the flowerbeds and our fisherman in full throw as she whispered her plan. We were to have dinner the following week in a five-star establishment that was not too far away. She had looked it up. It was an old manor dating back to the times of William and Mary, with taffeta-lined niches for the diners to feel exclusive. To make it the special evening it must be, I was to arrive in the Railton and not my old van. I had to lie, say the Railton needed servicing and so I had
hired the Rolls-Royce from Jerry in the town, whom she knew, and who uses it for weddings. She came down the steps of that place like a bride-to-be, in a white linen skirt that Maggie, one of the inmates, had made for her, a cream lace blouse and white satin gloves that went up to the elbow. She got the gloves in the local vintage shop. The less loopy ones were allowed out under supervision and had cream teas in some cafe and always a visit to the vintage shop, to fit on hats and muffs and coatees. Her hair was curled at the ends and fell in an unbroken ringlet along the nape of her neck. She looked a picture. The menu was most peculiar. It was a tasting menu. We had marrowbones with jellied anchovies, followed by frogs’ legs with parsley and lovage. We had snails and porridge and octopus and it was all delicious. We drank. We made plans relating to the future. She wanted two forked trellises in two vats outside the bedroom window in order to grow sweet peas, because the smell of sweet pea was the sweetest, the airiest and the one she could recapture in her mind at will. My wife was an artist
manqué
. The paintings of flowers that she loved were numerous, especially Van Gogh’s last tempestuous orchards. She also loved the gentler ones, Redon’s twigs, leaves and budding roses, Chardin, a sedate bunch of red and white squeezed into a blue vase. She had oodles of postcards all along the windowsill and in that chest in the hall. Friends sent some on vacation and she bought several when we went up to London and visited one of the galleries. How she pored over paintings and often we sat and gazed while others were tearing around, so as to fit everything in. Once we saw Edvard Munch’s lonely houses and lonely isolated people, that both saddened and appealed to her. She did not have the courage to paint, her reason being a fear of the false. She detested falseness.
Even to the point of saying that some of the loonies exaggerated their conditions. One foreign woman, who had read of a doctor in some European clinic who used masks to prevent screaming, went around trying on the crude cardboard masks that she made incessantly. Annie hid what she was feeling, nothing exaggerated in her behaviour, everything concealed, like she must have lived in a black hole, or maybe it was a grey hole, which is worse. I drove her back to the place and at some point in that night of our celebration, she did it. Quite a painting it was. She had cut the veins on the front and the surround of her belly, but had left the cream blouse on. It was more abattoir than Van Gogh’s riotous orchards. I had not realised how far gone she was and how much she dreaded the homecoming, the ghost. We don’t know others. They are an enigma. We can’t know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth. She left me a note –
I feel so very tranquil now
was what it said.’

Here he stopped and turned aside and it was several minutes before he resumed. ‘Do I forgive her … at times I do and at times I do not. Now and then I see a sunset, a great carnival of colour that trails off into islets and I want her to be there, seeing it with me. Her family blamed me of course and took her remains to their burial place in Northumberland. They were mining people and very clannish. I destroyed all the postcards with their pretty posies, used them for kindling. Not a nice thing to do, but I had to kill something. There is one thing I often ponder. It is the note. When was it written. A week before. A day before. That very evening as she got ready and Maggie had to come and tie the little white buttons up the length of her forearm. Or even after our fond goodnight. You see, I think she wanted not to do
it as much as she wanted to do it, and that is the hardest thing to bear. Why am I telling you all this?’

He said it quietly, then answered for her – ‘There is something in you that I saw in her, some likeness, an evanescence. The same hands, so small, so timid, and a trust that is only found in the very innocent. But she lacked something. She bent, as the reed bends. You see, she had gone under to the black beneath, but she didn’t say and she didn’t ask … Oh my God, the awful loneliness of it, the finality,’ and at that he clammed up. Spent and haggard, he was like a figure suddenly stripped naked. Sitting within inches of one another on that log, she could see him visibly gathering his strength to be the hesitant rooted man he always seemed, the man for whom nature was everything. She thinks
He has done this for me … he has done this to give me courage
and she bowed her head in deference.

He was standing then, looking up at a buzzard that hovered in the upper air, the thermal air as he named it, circling and climbing until it would spot its prey far down below and then dive with an exact and murderous swiftness. Crows, blackbirds, jackdaws, pigeons and the wild doves, all lying in wait for the pickings.

It was time to leave the place that had been sacred to him and was now to her.

A world had transpired in there and now they were out in the open, with the sun blazing on the hot fields, as they walked in single file along a worn track. Further on the path forked in all directions, so that they passed through young spruce woods and open clearings, then back to woods again, alternating light and shadow.

Penge

There was a bite in the air and the stars frozen in the heavens. Frost weighed down the dead stalks, and the tiled roof had the sparkle of saltpetre. Branches of the wisteria that climbed up the porch were ashen, like old bones, clawing their way. The lawn there was an unblemished cape of frost.

James had brought out a wee dram to keep warm, as they stood listening for the taxi. Jenny was in the porch, her tartan coat still on, reluctant to venture forth.

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

They had both memorised that poem, because in the evenings he sometimes invited her into his snug to read to him. It was there they came to be familiar with John Clare, John Keats, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and many another. They used to wonder about these poets, how haughty, or how amenable they might be. James reckoned that Keats would hide like the little wren in the ivy, from the formidable, bosomy Marianne. Strange as he said, that she, who advocated silence, wrote reams, but still, as he conceded, she was the
woman who gave the world ‘by darkness a star is perfected’.

He was restless, tapping the minute crystals off the glass of the thermometer, then staking some straggling rose bushes and wandering up to the road for the sound of a car. Her new suitcase on the gravelled path seemed an affront.

There was a total silence, birds hiding in the trees and the chimney pots, except for one little creature, its feathers covered in snow, that appeared as the messenger from the famished bird world. They were listening intently for the taxi, fearing it might not come. But finally a car swung into the lane at a hectic speed, and the young animated driver, believing that both were travelling, opened both back doors. James, fleetingly thrown, said, ‘Someone has to stay at home and mind the house.’ It was an awful moment.

Then he shook her hand for the first time ever, but the constraint was such that he had to pick up Jenny, who was shivering with cold, and her cries so ostentatious in themselves, served as a goodbye for both of them.

*

As the train pulled into Liverpool Street Station, she felt the zippiness of the city, people rushing in all directions, going through the turnstiles like fiends and from the cafes there was a smell of coffee and warm bread rolls. Christmas already featured, six weeks too soon. There were novelties in the souvenir shops and the necklaces and chains in the jewellers were stranded with tinsel, to give an added glitter. The Christmas tree reached almost to the domed roof and was laden with bells, baubles, wings of white gauze to simulate butterflies and small boxes wrapped in
crimson paper. Gifts for a children’s hospital were in a big pile and from the street, the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ and Santa rattling his collection box. A young man, wearing a baseball cap, handed her a small tin for free and she held it like a trophy. In the Underground, before opening it, she read that it was a very low-volume lager, cut with cloudy lemon.
Keep the planet tidy, recycle this little fella
, it said in small print on the back. It tasted too sweet, but she drank it nevertheless.

Penge had not yet decked herself for Christmas, but preparations had begun. Around each of the lampposts, there was different paraphernalia, bicycle chains, umbrella spokes, broken lamps and the separated strings of a golden harp. A man with white hair, in old coat tails, a sort of Pied Piper, moved up and down the street, extolling the would-be decorations, saying the lights would soon be turned on and that it would be a big occasion, with choirs from neighbouring boroughs coming to sing carols and free mulled wine.
All are welcome, all are welcome
, he said as she passed by.

Jasmeen opened the front lock from the inside and as Fidelma passed the adjoining window, Mistletoe was standing, staring. It was as if she had not left that spot in the intervening months, an effigy with a look of injury.

Jasmeen hugged her like a sister and Jade appeared in the ermine bolero, yawning, saying she would put coffee on. They were all talking at once. She must see the new electric cooker, with its high oven, no more bending down and Jasmeen had also been given a brand new swish Peugeot by the company. Jade had hooked up with a band, where she had a solo spot singing two of her own songs that they had put to music.

‘Ah, the letter,’ Jasmeen said then and went to fetch it from
under an ornament, a letter she had been meaning to forward, but of course forgot.

The envelope had the name of Fidelma’s solicitor in Galway. She shook as she opened it.

Dear Fidelma,
   
Long time no see. I hope London is good to you. I am writing to inform you that as of each month, starting now, I am to deposit the sum of two thousand six hundred pounds to your bank account there. Please let me have details, name of bank, account number, sort code and IBAN. The donor wishes to remain anonymous and when I’m told something, I am a good boy and that is what I do. Give us a shout when you are over. Yours, Gerry.