he likes to know there are lives going on around us. Some nights he sleeps out there. This evening he told me I was intolerant.
Tonight I long to be alone. I would walk around the carpeted rooms upstairs, straightening curtains, folding clothes, arranging things. I would lie on the bed and inhale Don’s scent on the pillow and this contact, this proximity to him, would be enough to make me nervous and excitable, too hopeful. Sometimes when Don and Robin are out and I am alone in the house I am prone to elation, swept up in some vague contentment at the near memory of them.
I let myself linger in their afterglow, and then something—a knock on the door, a news item on the TV, the gas boiler firing up outside—will shatter it all. Lately I have become concerned for our future. It is not the fact of growing old, but of growing different. Don gets impatient if I say these things and I see his face change and I know he is thinking, For God’s sake, woman, pull yourself together.
I go into the bathroom and the light stings my eyes. I splash water on my face. He will hear my movements now. I rub on cream and massage the skin around my eyes and cheek bones. My eyes are blue, like Lucy’s. There are four girls in my family and we all have blue eyes. I go out on the landing and lean over the banisters and check the line of light under the kitchen door. I pause outside Lucy’s door. I imagine her under the bedclothes, the sheet draped over her shoulders, her hair spilling onto the pillow. Lucy is a musician; she plays the cello in an orchestra and this evening she played a Romanian folk dance in our living room. Robin was in her jammies, ready for bed and afterwards she picked up Lucy’s bow. Lucy let her turn it over carefully and explained about horsehair and rosin and how string instruments make music and she showed her how to pluck a string. Then she whisked her up into her arms and nuzzled her and breathed in my daughter’s apple-scented hair.
‘Have you thought about music lessons for her?’ she asked me a moment later. ‘She could learn piano, or violin. She’s old enough, you know.’ Before I could reply she brought her face close to Robin’s. ‘Would you like that, Sweetheart—would you like to play some real mu-sic?’ Robin giggled and clung to Lucy like a little monkey. They sat on the sofa across from me. A bluebottle came from nowhere and buzzed above my head.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She’s already got so much going on. And she’s only six.’ I watched the bluebottle zigzag drunkenly towards the uplighter and for a second I was charged with worry. Every day insects fly into that lighted corner and land on the halogen bulb and extinguish themselves in a breath.
‘Don’t leave it too late, Annie. She’s got an ear, she’s definitely got an ear. I said so to Don today.’
She carried Robin upstairs then and they left a little scent in their wake. It reminded me of the cream roses that clung to the arched trellis in our garden at home. No, it reminded me of Lucy. I think she has always given off this scent, like she’s discarding a surfeit of love. I wonder if all that wood and rosin and sheep gut suffocates her scent. I think of her sitting among the other cellists, her bulky instrument between her knees, her hair falling on one side of her face, the bow in her right hand drawing out each long mournful note, the fingers of her left hand pressed on the neck of the instrument or sliding down the fingerboard until I think she will bleed out onto the strings. I watched those hands today as they passed Robin a vase of flowers. She has taught Robin to carry the flowers from room to room as we move.
I turn and tiptoe into Robin’s room. The lamplight casts a glow on her skin and her breathing is so silent that for a second I am worried and think to hold a tiny mirror to her mouth, the way nurses check the breath of the dying. She is a beautiful child, still and contained and perfect, and so apart from me that sometimes I think she is not mine, no part of me claims her. Don has stayed home and is raising her and she is growing confident. Often at work I pause midway through typing a sentence, suddenly reminded of them, and I imagine them at some part of their day: Don making her lunch, talking to her teacher, clutching her schoolbag and waiting up for her along the footpath. I have an endless set of images I can call on. This evening as I pulled into the drive Don was putting his key in the door. The three of them, Don, Lucy and Robin, had been for a walk. It was windy, they had scarves and gloves on and their cheeks were flushed. Lucy and Robin laughed and waved at me as I pulled in. I sat looking at them all for a moment. Now I have a new image to call on.
If I ever have another child I will claim it—I will look up at Don after the birth and say ‘This one’s mine.’ I have it all planned.
After dinner this evening Don took the cold-water tap off the kitchen sink. He spread newspapers and tools over the floor and cleared the cupboard shelves and stretched in to work on the pipes. He opened the back door and went out and back to the shed several times and cold air blew through the house. After a while there was a gurgle, a gasp, and a rush of water spilled out along the shelf onto the floor. He jumped back and swore. Robin was in the living room watching Nickelodeon and Lucy was practising in the dining room. I had been roaming about the house tidying up, closing curtains, browsing. I had stepped over Don a few times and over the toolbox and spanners and boxes of detergent strewn around him.
‘What’s up?’ I asked finally. His head was in the cupboard. ‘What are you at?’ I pressed.
‘Freeing it up,’ he said, and I thought of the journey these three words had to make, bouncing off the base of the sink before ricocheting back out to me. ‘Did you not notice how slow it’s been lately?’
I leaned against the counter. The cello drifted in from the next room, three or four low-pitched notes, a pause, then the same notes repeated again.
‘Wouldn’t the plunger have cleared it?’ I watched his long strong torso and his shoulders pressed against the bottom shelf. He drew up one leg as he strained to turn a bolt. His brown corduroys were threadbare at the right knee and the sight of this and the thought of his skin underneath made me almost forgive him. The cello paused and then started again and I focused on the notes, and tried to recognise the melody. Lucy favours Schubert; she tells me he is all purity. I have no ear and can scarcely recognise Bach.
‘Is that urgent?’ I asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Can’t it wait then?’
I imagined his slow blink. Next door Lucy turned a page. I sensed her pause and steady herself before raising her bow again. A single sombre note began to unfurl into the surrounding silence and when I thought it could go on no longer and she really would bleed out of her beautiful hands, it touched the next note and ascended and then descended the octave and I thought this is Bach, this is that sublime suite that we listened to over and over in the early months of the pregnancy, and then never again, because Don worried that such melancholy would affect his unborn child.
‘Can’t you do these jobs during the day, when there’s no one here?’ I blurted. A new bar had begun and the music began to climb, to envelop, again.
He reversed out of the cupboard and threw the spanner in the box. ‘What the hell is needling you this evening?’
‘Shh. Keep your voice down. Please.’
It was Bach, and I strove to catch each note and draw out the title while I still could, before it closed in.
He began to gather up the tools and throw them in the toolbox. ‘Jesus, we have to live.’ I stood there half-listening. The music began to fade until only the last merciful note lingered. I can recognise the signs, the narrowing of his eyes as he speaks, the sourness of his mouth when he’s hurt and abhorred and can no longer stand me, and when the music stopped I longed to stop too, and gaze at him until something flickered within and his eyes met mine and we found each other again.
He
