flight and your one great chance in life.
What’s so strange? Many women nowadays leave their children. As I say, I wasn’t the maternal type: my husband was always more involved. I think that’s what made me go off him. I just can’t love a man who likes to wash dishes and gets involved with the school nativity play. I’d cringe with embarrassment at the soppy bits, while genuine tears would run down his cheeks. It wouldn’t do.
A victory? Yes, I suppose it is a victory, that’s how I described it earlier. To take a man from someone else. From his wife. To win his affections. Not that I set out to do it. I just was, and he just was, and there we were, and she wanted to be herself anyway, didn’t she. That’s what she said. Find her true self. It’s been two years. I heard a noise from the back of the linen cupboard the other day: I looked, the noise drew me to it, such a little delicate clang, clang clanging, like a fairy fire bell. It was her alarm clock, I hadn’t known it was there, tucked away. Such a pretty little clock, with a tiny gold bell for an alarm, and the dial had flowers painted on it. That spooked me a bit. It was hers, left over. She was still lurking in the house. Perhaps she’d forgiven me. Perhaps she was trying to warn me. More likely something had just fallen on the alarm switch, and set it off. Perhaps the cat had disturbed it, looking for somewhere safe to have kittens. She’s pregnant again, that’s the second litter since I moved in and I have to find homes for all the kittens. As if I don’t have enough to do.
I probably didn’t tell you she found us in bed together but that wasn’t why she left, of course it wasn’t. Something like that wouldn’t be important if the relationship was good. She’d left the house before I’d even got out of bed and she never came back. She wrote a letter or two. We threw them away unopened. Why should she damage our happiness? And now I’m here. We’re here. Jub, rub-a-dub-dub, I think perhaps he’s rub-a dub-dubbing with someone else. The doctor’s given me different sleeping pills. They’re stronger. The dreams are back. I wander in a grey, still, flat landscape, without beginning or end. Sometimes the dreams creep into my waking life, so I can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.
I think I should have taken the sheets down to the charity shop way back, but they were just so pretty and I’m so plain. I think one day I’ll come back from work and there he’ll be in the bed with someone else, because perhaps our relationship isn’t so good as I believe, and perhaps he does hanker after Chloe, and perhaps he does blame me—you know what men are—so perhaps he’ll find someone totally new. And I’ll walk out of the house too, saying I want nothing, I want to start a new life, I have to go in search of myself and I’ll leave everything behind, as she did. I don’t think the new woman will like my sheets, though, nearly as much as I liked Chloe’s. Mine are thin nylon, easy to wash, drip-dry, non-iron, practical, cheap.
The ghost would have to be exorcised. Hugh had no doubt about it. Oriole had some doubts about the ghost. Ghosts did not exist. But some residual sense of the authority of the male over the female remained bedded in him: his it was to dictate the nature of the universe. She was older than he was by seven years and the family breadwinner, but never mind. He wanted to call the priest in now, now, now and so did his brother Clive, and they weren’t listening to her. Hugh even picked up the telephone to call his father the Diocesan Bishop, who could recommend a good exorcist if anyone could—the Church of England acknowledged the occasional need for exorcists, though they didn’t focus on the matter if they could help it—and Oriole had to pull the phone line out of its socket to stop him making the call. And then the fifth cup whistled past her ear: just rose from its saucer and hurled itself against the wall and broke. That stopped them. Silence fell. The cup, being eighteenth-century Meissen and of the most fragile porcelain, exploded rather than broke, and every tiny splinter had its own peculiar little crackle, so the ensuing silence seemed particularly dense. And again the temperature had fallen, which you only noticed after the event, when you began to feel warm again.
‘Okay,’ said Oriole. ‘You win,’ and she re-plugged the phone again and Hugh and Clive called their father. Oriole, rather than hear the conversation went to ask Sarla the help to bring dustpan and brush. Sarla was sitting at the kitchen table calmly enough, reading Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These days she had a clear complexion, a sweet smile, glossy hair, and though she still had no work visa seemed untroubled enough, and one way and another not capable of instigating poltergeist activity. According to the Internet this latter was usually associated with neurotic adolescent girls. Just as pre-pubertal boys could do Uri Geller tricks, make heavy cutlery bend and twist simply by rubbing it, teenage girls could apparently create a sufficient energy field to hurl small domestic objects around the house in a mildly malevolent way. But Sarla was into her late twenties and twice the girl she’d been when she’d joined the household two years back as a sallow, skinny, grieving refugee from Muslim Bosnia with very little English.
But even if poltergeist activity was a ‘proved’ fact, it didn’t mean that the energy required to overcome the normal inertia of stationary objects was paranormal: just that the laws which governed the phenomenon were not yet properly understood.
In Oriole’s perception the natural universe obeyed definite physical laws. You dropped things, they broke. You heated water, it boiled. People died, they stayed dead. She’d once sat next to the Astronomer Royal at a formal dinner organised by her employers, Dree Pharmaceuticals, to present the new annual Dree prize for Mathematics—and he’d told her all about the Big Bang and how it was pointless to ask what happened before, as people tended to do, because time itself only started at that moment. He’d then added that the Big Bang was only another Creation Myth, which rather spoiled things, and formal speeches had begun before she could question him further.
Nevertheless—until the matter of the suicidal cups: she still tried to joke about them—she’d had no doubt but that once put in motion the universe worked like clockwork, wound up and set going—by Big Bang or Prime Mover, who cared—cogs turning, gravity tugging, evolution soldiering on, obeying its own internal rules, and no exceptions. And now she found herself agreeing to an exorcism. Hugh and Clive had pressured her into it. She, who resented so little, found herself resenting this. If it was anyone’s ghost, anyone’s poltergeist, anyone’s paranormal phenomenon, it was hers. Her ear the teacups whistled past, gold rims glittering as they flew. Her cups, or at any rate her deceased grandmother’s, brought out of Germany in 1937. Her dresser: her whole house come to that: she might put Hugh’s name on the title deeds but it was hers by moral right.
She told Sarla another two cups had broken and the pieces needed to be put in an envelope for the menders. Sarla said she’d do it when she’d finished the scene in which Titania falls in love with the ass. She was looking up all unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Sarla was developing a fine Shakespearean vocabulary. Since Oriole was paying an immigration lawyer some thousands of pounds to help Sarla qualify for citizenship it was good to see her thus dedicated to the culture of her putative new country. Nevertheless Oriole would have liked a more instant response, a springing to the feet at the behest of her employer. ‘Don’t worry,’ Oriole said, a little more briskly than usual, ‘I’ll do it.’
When the first bill relating to Sarla’s visa came through Hugh remarked it would be cheaper to pay someone to marry her and get her citizenship that way, and Oriole had found that somehow shocking. What shocked
