Here's a first chapter of what might end up being called After Apple-Picking: A Sestina.
“You don’t know how happy you are,” is what my sister Hillary told me, and it is true I did not know how happy I was eight days earlier when the cat was missing, the light was about to move out of the room I needed to shoot in, I couldn’t reach the wire to hang up one of the floor-to-ceiling photographs I needed to hang, I was still waiting for Molly to collect the other one, and no one was anywhere, Rob wasn’t answering my texts and Molly doesn’t have a phone. It used to be the children who got anxious if I wasn’t there to be called on but at some point I had become the one who gets anxious when Fred and Molly aren’t home. The calmest I have been in years was during the autumn Covid lockdown when both of them were here all the time and I had to hide out in the studio to get away. Now Fred has returned to living in the large and mouldy house he shares with three flatmates, and I hardly see much more of Molly who is taking every subject the university offers even though she is far too busy with community activism to get to any of her classes. So I’m left with only my own two hands which aren’t enough for almost anything I want to do and I’ve had too many years of basically being a six-handed person to adjust back to two hands. This particular afternoon, for instance, how was I going to hold the cat cage open while also holding a cat?
Then Fred’s friend Jay’s battered looking red car pulled in to the drive and though it wasn’t Molly’s friend’s boyfriend’s van, as I was expecting, I could see the rolled-up photographs sticking out of one of the back-seat windows, which was a relief though an alarming way for the photographs to travel particularly since it was Fred, rather than Jay, driving the car. Molly bounded out of the car’s front seat, and I flinched to see her trying to open the back door with the photographs still leaning of the window, but by the time I raced out to try and direct operations Fred had got the photographs out through the other side of the car with the help of Molly’s friend Stella. I took the other end of the roll from Stella who was still somewhat crumpled up in the car where she’d been sitting squashed by the photographs, and backed carefully towards the house, shouting at Molly to shut the gate in case the cat had got into the garden, not that the gate would be likely to contain him if he had, and realising I’d left the front door of the house open so shouting at Molly to also keep an eye on the front door.
“I’m keeping an eye on the front door,” said Fred. “I’m walking towards it.”
“And if you see him let me know!” I shouted to Molly.
“Through it,” Fred updated me.
“But don’t shout or you’ll frighten him!” I shouted at Molly, and told Fred to kick the door shut behind him, since I was pretty sure the cat was inside, really.
“Through to the living room,” I instructed Fred, “Don’t trip on Molly’s books.”
Instead he tripped on the cat who came rushing out of the living room as soon as I opened the living room door. I hadn’t looked for him there already because the door had been shut, which should have meant he couldn’t get in to it but instead meant he hadn’t been able to get out and was now so desperate to escape that he tripped up Fred who fell right on top of the roll of photographs.
“Fred!” I wailed, as the front door opened, and “Shut the door! Don’t come in!” to Molly, who came in and tripped on the cat, and to Stella, who backed away as the cat fled out the front door and fell backwards down the steps.
“Well, that’s three months work ruined,” I said.
“It’s only my wrist broken,” Fred said, “the photographs are fine.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Get off them?”
They were surprisingly unscathed. Fred actually had managed to take most of his weight on his wrist, and only dented the outside layer of photographs very slightly. Luckily that was one of the ones for Stella’s production, not my one for the rest home.
“Come and have a look,” I called to Molly and Stella.
“What about the cat?” asked Fred.
“Can you catch the cat?” I called to Molly and Stella, pulling the photographs through to the living room.
There were four of them, the three backdrops for the play and the street view we were going to hang at the end of the rest home corridor, which I wanted to pose the cat in front of, to take another photo of it with the cat in. It was an extremely costly detail to add, and now I’d lost the cat. But the photo had worked out beautifully, with a very slightly uncanny glow to the colours, the pink of the rhododendrum where Diana had lived particularly vivid, and the leaves lit up and shiny.
Fred isn’t particularly tall, but he is taller enough than I am that when on tiptoes on a dining room chair he can reach the wire I had hanging across the top of the wall, to peg up the photographs. I got him to peg both up, the one I’d tried to peg up in the morning and the one I’d sent Molly to fetch. Masking tape at the bottom secured them flat enough to the wall for me to be able to work with them, and I checked the distance through the viewfinder of my camera one more time. I shot a couple with Fred in, just because I love taking photographs of Fred, one with him looking seriously towards me and one camping it up for the camera, a ringlet falling across his face. Now all I needed was the cat.
I was hoping Molly might have found him, but she was still sitting with Stella on the front steps. She’d evidently gone inside at one point because there was a wet cloth on the ground, a packet of bandaids and a snowstorm of bandaid wrappers which I would have thought were against her anti-packaging principles but I resisted saying anything when I saw how tear-stained Stella’s face was.
“You’re not seriously hurt?” I asked.
“I’m heart-broken,” Stella said, setting off a whole new course of tears.
“James?”
“Ugh!” she replied through her tears, which I thought was a good sign, really. James did quite often break up with her. They’d been together since they were thirteen, from the first day of high school, which I knew not because Stella and Molly were particular friends back then but because the longstandingness of this relationship was legendary. James and Stella were so legendary a couple I suspected they had got a bit trapped in their own legendariness, though James, at least, wasn’t so trapped he wasn’t able to break up with her from time to time.
“Come inside. I’ll warm up some rolls or something, and make tea.”
“It’s more a gin sort of break up,” said Molly.
“The gin got drunk the last gin sort of break up.”
Fred was already heating scones I’d forgotten were left over from yesterday, in the microwave which would leave them a little limp but still nicer than cold. They were date scones but I would hold off having the argument about eating jam with them (Molly was already getting the jam out of the fridge). I got out the big, solid cream-coloured tea-pot, figuring this was, if not a gin sort of break up, at least serious enough for the largest tea-pot. Stella really was miserable, she had a kind of dazed, blank look about her, and when I put a cup of tea infront of her, she clung to it with both her hands, staring into the tea cup, without drinking it. Before Rob, the longest I’d ever been with anyone was six months, and I remembered the feeling of ongoing panic I’d felt when we broke up, and Stella had been with James for so long it was part of who she was. And perhaps I was wrong to think of that as a problem, the way everyone said having children too young was a problem but I thought it was a good idea so that the whole undoing of yourself could happen without too much of yourself to undo and you could be your reconstructed self in the life you were going to make next, such as this life of sitting drinking tea with a girl too miserable even to drink tea.
“So, what happened?” I asked, putting an unwanted scone on her plate (without jam).
“He is too busy to play Romeo,” she said.
“Metaphorically? Or literally?”
“Both! And the play is in two weeks!”
“And when I think of everything we have been doing for him!” said Molly. “The times we stayed up fitting in bits of wood that didn’t fit in, the article Stella wrote, all the photography!”
Though the photography was me, of course, I didn’t add.
“Yes, but it was all for nothing,” Stella said.
“He can’t blame you for the pandemic!”
“He doesn’t! He doesn’t!” she wept, still defending him. “It’s true, though, he is really busy. His whole marketing thing has to be rewritten for uni but also, his whole – his whole – ”
“He has to rethink his marketing plans,” Molly explained.
“He was, he was...” Stella wept, “on the verge of success!”
I did know some of this already, having been quite invested in James’s furniture designs, and as excited as anyone when they were going to be taken up by a New York design store. Store isn’t quite the word for Freemans, not a gallery, but not just a store. It really meant something, to have furniture showing at Freemans. More orders would have surely followed, and there was going to be a big publicity push, all cancelled.
“I still don’t see why he has to break up with you,” I said.
“He didn’t!” Stella wept, “I broke up with him!”
“Oh!” I said. “Well, then, can’t you un-break up with him?”
“Mum!” said Molly and Fred at the same time.
“That makes it much harder,” Fred said, at the same time as Molly said, “She doesn’t want to.”
“I’m not going to,” Stella said, “even if I do want to.”
“Which you don’t,” Molly said.
“I can’t. It’s over. It really is, this time. It just....is,” Stella said, and the finality of it was somehow underlined by her stopping crying, and starting to drink her tea.
“So we might not even need the backdrops,” said Molly.
“Of course you’ll need the backdrops,” I said.
“We don’t have a Romeo!”
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” sighed Fred, as anyone would, though not as well as Fred.
“I don’t even care about the play anymore,” Stella said. “I hate the play.”
“Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. (Or a Capulet),” Fred said, kindly. “What's Montague? (Or Capulet?) It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man. (Or girl.)”
“O, be some other name! What's in a name?” continued Stella, sounding very prettily like Juliet despite her new-found hatred of the play. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”
“So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title,” concluded Fred, with a flourish.
“How come you know that?” Stella asked.
“Fred was the lead in the school production of Romeo and Juliet when he was in Year 10!” Molly said, still proud and a little astonished at the heights Fred had once reached.
“Were you Romeo?” Stella asked, looking, I thought, very slightly hopeful.
“No, Juliet,” said Fred. “But I did know most of Romeo’s lines as well, I had to, I was constantly having to prompt Alex.”
“How long would it take you to learn them again?” Stella asked, definitely looking hopeful.
But the negotiations were interrupted by a terrible yowling outside.
“Oh, help, it’s Jessica!” I cried. “We have to do something!”
Jessica is our own cat, a magnificent cat in her own way, but she has no tolerance at all for other cats.
“We can’t possibly lose Diana’s cat!” I said. “Not before I’ve photographed him!”
“Mum!” (Just Molly this time.)
“Or afterwards! But quick, do something!”
But be quick and do what I would have had no idea if Molly hadn’t taken command. The two cats, Jessica and George, were facing each other, bristling, on the largest branch of the kaka beak tree, which ran exactly above the fence, so that George was equally likely to leap onto the road side as the garden side. Molly positioned Stella inside the garden where the cat might head if he leapt inwards, she herself took a position just outside the fence in case he leapt outwards, having instructed Fred to remove Jessica from the tree while I was supposed to gently creep up on George and, ideally, fold him tenderly into my arms. But while I was creeping he leapt from the tree onto the fence, and when Fred ran towards the fence he leapt outwards, as Molly had predicted, and if Molly hadn’t been ready for him that would probably have been the last time we ever saw him.
I would have liked to have seen the catch, but by the time we got out the gate we found Molly lying on the ground, both arms around the cat, tensed with his ears flattened and ready to spring away if she released her hold a fraction. She was completely unable to move. Somehow, between us, we got Molly, and the cat, up off the ground and into the house, and we shut all the doors between the kitchen and the outdoors before Stella dared to hold open the cat cage, and Molly wrestled the cat in.
“Well done,” I said, as she peered in to the cage. “But put the lid down, please.”
“Are those my Greek notes?” she asked.
“Oh, maybe,” I said. I had lined the cat cage with something, I remembered, quite possibly the notes from Molly’s late night studying, which reminded me: “Don’t you have an exam this afternoon?”
Molly didn’t move. She was staring at her notes.
“Molly? Is it this afternoon?”
“I’ve missed my exam!”
“Well, no you haven’t. What time was it?”
“Oh my god it was 2 o’clock!” said Stella. “I’m so sorry!”
“It’s not your fault,” said Molly, still not getting up from the cat cage, or rather from the side of her notes.
“It’s not even three yet! Fred, you can take Molly to her exam can’t you?”
“It’s too late!”
“Isn’t it a three hour exam?”
“Yes, but...”
“Have you ever needed three hours for an exam?” I asked her.
“Yes!”
“You haven’t! You always finish early!”
“I need my notes,” she said, eyeing the cage.
“You do not need your notes. You are not opening the cage. You know you know everything, you knew everything before you even started studying last night, Fred, where are the keys?”
He jangled them at me.
“Quick, then, velocius quam asparagi conquantur,” I said, which is Latin for quicker than you can cook asparagus, a thing we say in our family. “But you’ll come back afterwards?”
“Is Dad coming back?” Molly asked.
“Molly,” Fred said, in a chastising tone.
He didn’t really need the chastising tone, but it is true it used to drive me wild when Molly always used to ask when Dad was coming home, every time he went away, or even when he was just at work. I think she liked to ask as often as she did to work me up, which is partly what used to work me up. The children liked to think I was jealous of Rob, and would say “now I really love Dad best!” whenever I snapped at them for asking yet again when he was coming home, but I don’t think I was. I’ve got a notebook in a drawer from the time Molly took up spying which I treasure for its three entries:
Fred. Brown hair. Good at drawing.
Dad. Eating toast. 9.7.06. Newpaper reading 1.25 pm. Short dark hair. Brown and red stripey t-shirt. Patch of hair on his lip under his nose he missed shaving. Smells salty. Blows his nose a lot. Saw me (good at hearing) (or seeing) Crinkled black socks. “Not going to say anything.”
Mum. Is a photographrer.
“Dad will be back,” was all I said, checking facebook again for a message from him. Whether he would actually be back I had no idea because the only messages, dozens of them, were all from my sister. She’d been sending messages all day but I’d only looked at the occasional last line of one, because if I opened them Hillary would see I had seen them and hadn’t replied which would lead to a further barrage of messages and probably an actual phone call. There seemed to be the combination of “what do I do” questions and “so how can that be my fault?” questions that generally heralded another relationship breakdown and a desperate need for long talks about the impossibility of her doing anything at all, long talks during which I was not allowed to say anything because anything I said made her furious, except that it also made her furious if I didn’t say anything. I love my sister but I really did not want to talk to her. “I just do feel quite desperate,” she had written, followed by “I haven’t heard otherwise,” followed by, “So shall I call you?” “Don’t call now, crisis here as usual, can you call later on?” I wrote back.
“Are you coming, Stella?” Fred was asking.
Stella looked uncertain. There was no time for her to decide.
“She can stay here,” I said. “You’ll come back afterwards, won’t you? You can pick Molly up afterwards, can’t you Fred?”
“I can take a bus,” Molly said.
“But you’ll need to come back for Stella,” I said.
“I can go with Fred,” Stella said. “We could take the backdrops to the hall, maybe try out some lines?”
“There’s no time for the backdrops!” I said.
“But we could try out some lines,” Fred said.
“Go then!” I said. “Go, go! But come back afterwards, I’m cooking for all of you.”
I shooed them out the door and stood in the doorway just making sure they did drive away, then went back inside thinking I should actually do something. I wandered into the living room to check on the light. I would ordinarily use artificial light, and I probably would in the end for this too, but there was a moment in the day when the whole room had a kind of golden glow, and yesterday a shaft of sunlight just touched the edge of George’s fur lighting him up in the most miraculous way the second before he jumped off the box and ran away the first time. I’d missed that moment today, and in any case George was in no state to pose and I would be too nervous to try without a back-up crew to catch him should he run away again. The photograph was actually perfect without the cat in it. I rolled out the backdrops for the play and they, too, were perfect, with the same slightly unreal looking colours.
I would go through Hillary’s messages properly when I got back from the supermarket, I decided, but before I could go to the supermarket I needed to find one of the masks Molly had made and sold to me (fundraising for the hall) or, failing that, the disposable ones I’d bought months ago from the supermarket and which must be somewhere in the house. This turned out to involve cleaning out all the bathroom cupboards – it was amazing how many empty packets and curled up tubes we kept in there – and going through all the sock drawers trying to match single socks and, finally, though how I got there I don’t know, taking all the books out of the bookcase in the hall and polishing the book shelf shelves. Then suddenly it was late and there wasn’t even time to go to the supermarket, or not unless I really rushed, and there would be no time when I got back. I checked facebook again just to see if there was anything from Rob or Fred and to make sure Hillary hadn’t reached too high a pitch of desperation. Nothing from Rob or Fred, and from Hillary just “I can call later on, just tell me if its okay,” which didn’t sound too desperate at all. “Things on tonight so perhaps call tomorrow?” I replied, searching for my wallet and some bags. “Ok so that’s ok then?” Hillary had replied when I looked again, and I threw in a quick “Yes! That would be great!” before I dashed out the door, leaving behind my polished bookshelves.
When I got back from the supermarket – I was going to roast everything that had ever lived below ground – the red car was just pulling in. Fred had not only brought Molly and Stella back but also Jay, who was in fact driving their own car this time. Everyone seemed to be extremely buoyant, Fred and Jay both so much so that I almost wondered, as I had used to wonder a long time ago, whether he and Jay might be more than friends, except that Fred has never seemed to need to be more than friends with anyone. Molly’s exam had obviously gone well (of course it had gone well) and even Stella was looking less devastated than she had earlier.
“Is Dad back?” Molly asked, partly asking, partly teasing.
“You can check for messages,” I said, handing her the phone.
Molly resists the attention economy by not having a phone of her own but she doesn’t have a problem checking my phone, and for someone resisting the attention economy, I can’t think of anyone who pays more attention, to world politics, local politics, and everyone around her, while also attending to the most arcane details of ancient Roman and Greek languages and culture.
“A lot of messages from Hillary,” Molly observed. Then the phone actually rang and Molly inconsiderately answered it, which didn’t worry me nearly as much as it should have because she almost simultaneously said, “Dad!” I was therefore taken off guard when she handed the phone over to me and I found myself talking to Hillary, while Molly raced to the gate to greet Rob who got to hear all the details of the exam while I was stuck on the phone. I was only half listening to Hillary as she listed everything that was terrible about her life, while half listening to Stella and Fred and Jay and finding them beers and putting the kettle on and unpacking the groceries. It would all have been much easier if I’d just put the phone down while I did all that but I kept it dutifully to my ear.
“Mum!” said Molly, “has the cat been in the cage all afternoon?”
Jessica came in after Molly – “shut the door,” I called to Rob – and seeing George in the cage froze, hissed and frothed up her fur.
“He doesn’t even have any water!” Molly said.
“He’s been asleep all afternoon!” I said.
“What?” said Hillary.
“The cat,” I said.
“Are you even listening?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Okay well I’ll see you on the fourteenth,” she said. “I’ll just message you the flight number. I can’t talk to you on the phone!”
And she hung up.
“Bread!” said Rob, pulling a loaf of bread out of a paper bag and holding on tight to it when Fred tried to take it. “And did you get a chance to draft my application?”
“She said flight number!” I said.
“What’s a dish I can give him some water in?” said Molly. “And has he been fed?”
“He honestly has been asleep,” I told her.
He was backing up into the corner of the cage now, fluffing up his own fur at Jessica and looking deeply anxious. “I think we need to remove Jessica.”
“Or move George. He can’t stay in the cage, Mum.”
Flight number?
“Could we put him in the laundry? Rob, do you know where the litter tray is? Or a box would do. Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner, Jay? Molly, can you hold the door open? Is there a cushion or something that won’t smell of Jessica?”
“All of the cushions smell of Jessica,” Molly said.
“Your pillows don’t.”
“He can’t have my pillows!”
“Just one! We can change the pillow case afterwards! Well, mine then, but then I’ll need to borrow one of yours.”
“What about a towel?” said Rob.
This was a good idea. We made him two bed options, using many towels, one on top of the washing machine because cats like heights, and one under the sink, in case George didn’t, and Molly got him a dish of cat biscuits while I filled a bowl with water for him. All this time George remained backed into the corner of his cage, showing no interest in coming out.
“Should we lift him out of the cage?” I wondered.
“He’s quite agile,” Molly said. “He’ll be able to get out when he wants to.”
So we left him in his cage, locked in the laundry, surrounded by all the amenities he would have access to should he decide to come out.
Jay was heading off, but they promised to come back to pick up Fred and anyone else who needed a lift later on, and I tried to persuade them to come back early enough that they could have something to eat with us, since there was going to be plenty. I chopped vegetables while Rob told us about his problems sourcing beds, and drank wine while I fried haloumi cheese, and listened again to Stella’s explanation of why James couldn’t play Romeo, in which she didn’t even mention the fact that they had broken up, and toasted pumpkin seeds for the pumpkin salad while Molly gave a moving account of a penguin trying to get out to sea on a piece of floating ice while being menaced by a seal.
“Flight number?” I thought, as I cleared some books and scissors, envelopes and vegetable bags, a milk bottle, Rob’s keys and Fred’s scarf off the table.
“The seal steered the ice floe further and further away from the other penguins until finally it had got the penguin where it wanted it, and came up for the kill,” Molly said, “and the penguin, which had been standing helplessly on the ice floe suddenly just turned round and glared at the seal and shouted at it, raark, raark, and the seal looked surprised” – I tried to imagine a surprised looking seal, and couldn’t quite – “and said ruh! ruh! back at the penguin, and the penguin stared it right in the eyes and said, raark! at it again, and the seal backed off a bit and said, ruh! and then they stared at each other for a bit, and then the seal made a move forwards again and the penguin said raark! and the seal said ruh! and then it turned round and slid back into the water and swam away.”
“I suppose you can’t really eat someone you’ve had a conversation with,” I said.
“Raark, raark!” said Fred, waving a potato at me.
“We’ll plant that one,” I said.
“I feel like the seal was probably telling the penguin about all the other murders it had committed,” Stella rather surprisingly chipped in.
There was only a moment’s pause and then Fred enthusiastically said, “I know! They always do that!” making me wonder where Fred got his knowledge of marine biology from.
(I knew where Molly got hers, from watching David Attenborough, which she’s been doing for years. When she was quite small she would use her David Attenborough voice to explain to herself our more puzzling behaviours, which sometimes did seem to access a more sophisticated knowledge of what was going on than she might otherwise have been able to articulate to herself. It could be quite unnerving.)
“It could have just eaten the penguin, but no...” Stella said.
“...fifteen minutes to go,” Fred continued, “and instead of ending it early, it has to fill in the time till the credits explaining every plot detail...”
But then they had to work out what the penguin could possibly have been saying to turn the seal around, while I finally forced myself to look back over Hillary’s messages. She had, in fact, been in quite a desperate mood while I’d been ignoring her messages all morning, which culminated in this exchange between us:
H: so I just need to get away!
H: I’m going to book flights.
H: Is it okay if I stay with you a couple of weeks?
H: I could stay in Fred’s room.
H: I am going out of my mind! I really need to hear from you!
H: Bridgid?
H: ok I am just going to book flights if I don’t hear otherwise from you.
H: I just do feel quite desperate.
H: I haven’t heard otherwise....
H: Shall I call you?
B: Don’t call now, crisis going on as usual, can you call later on?
H: I need to decide now!
H: I can call later on, just tell me if its okay.
B: I’ve just got a bit on today, perhaps call tomorrow?
H: Ok, so that’s okay then?
B: Yes! That would be great!
“Hillary is coming to stay and I told her it would be great!” I interrupted everyone.
There was a moment’s silence, then Molly tentatively asked why I’d said it would be great, while Rob asked if the vegetables were ready to come out of the oven.
“Rob!” I said. “Hillary! Is! Coming! To! Stay!”
“I’ll get them out,” he said. “Is there anything you need to do to them?”
“Aarrghhhh!”
“When exactly is she coming to stay?” Molly asked.
“She’s not coming to stay!” I said, getting up to toss the vegetables and everything together in a bowl.
Another message from Hillary came in, the promised flight details.
“The fourteenth? No! No she is not! That’s the night before the zoom interview!”
This meant I would be up all night talking and drinking and the next morning no matter how late she had stayed up, Hillary would get up just when I was on the laptop doing my interview and would drift in wearing some sort of silky something and would linger, and with her listening in the background I would be far too embarrassed to say anything at all.
“Fred, you have to have an emergency and need to move back home,” I said. “Your room cannot be empty.”
“But you hate her staying in the studio,” Rob pointed out.
“She can’t stay in the studio! I’ll tell her I’m using it! I’ll need it for the, I’ll have a deadline!”
“That won’t stop her,” Molly said.
“I’ll bomb it!” I said.
“You won’t bomb it and Fred’s not moving home and you’ll love having her and you’ll drink too much and I will do all the cooking and washing up,” said Rob.
“She can have my room if she likes, because I’m moving out,” said Molly.
“You’re not! You’re not allowed to, and you don’t even have to! Of course Fred will move home!”
“You can’t just use us as human shields,” said Molly.
“Who else can I use?” I cried, utterly exasperated.
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in!” I shouted, but it was Jay, so they were already coming in, with a couple of friends even.
Jay was looking completely marvellous, having changed out of the vinyl trousers, t-shirt and biker boots they were wearing earlier into a very short dress with pink and gold sequins, over blue tights, and with gold tinsel wrapped around their coppery hair, making it sort of surge up in wonderful waves.
“You look amazing!” I said. “All of you!”
No one looked as amazing as Jay, but it was true their friends did also look pretty amazing, one in a very low cut red dress with flounces galore and the other in a red satin dressing-gown with some kind of glitter paste making their beard sparkle.
“Poetry reading?” I guessed.
“Yes but we need someone to read Rebecca’s poem, she’s desperately ill with a slight cold,” Jay said. “This is Tui, by the way, and Ez.” (“Hello” said Tui shyly. “Yo,” said Ez.) “Fred? Could you? Please? Tui and Ez will be your back-up dancers.”
Molly was fetching chairs, Rob found extra plates, Fred was offering food and beer or wine. Jay was practically dancing on their feet, wanting to go, or at least to settle the question of Fred’s involvement, but Ez, who was already sitting in Molly’s seat before she had even got chairs for the others, took a plate from Rob and heaped it up at once with an amount of food I would have thought would take an hour to get through. Tui perched on the edge of a chair Molly offered her and sipped at a glass of wine.
“Do I have to know it off by heart?” Fred asked. “I can’t stand on the stage reading off a bit of paper.”
“You can, you can!” Jay said. “With Tui and Ez doing the dancing you totally can! And you know the poem, it is the one about the boy in the milking shed!”
“My favourite,” Fred said, in a swoony voice. Then he snapped back into his hardest negotiating tones, directed, however, not at Jay but at me.
“I will totally have to wear the paisley shirt, though,” he said.
“You can’t!” I said. “I’m not lending it till...”
“...after the zoom thing,” Fred said. “No, but please, Mum, you actually will have to.”
Fred loves my paisley shirt, which he has worn about a dozen times for every time I have ever worn it. He probably loves it for the diaphonous texture of the material and for its wonderful combination of golds and greens and bronze, and I love it because it is like a pyjama shirt, with piping even, while being an actual shirt you can wear in the world, but in any case, we both love it, and he knew, he knew, I had to wear it for my zoom interview.
“What’s wrong with the shirt you are wearing now?” I said. “It’s perfect! It’s magnificent! It’s – piratical!”
It was a magnificent shirt – a white blouse that puffed out marvellously with big sleeves and narrow cuffs. How Fred finds these things I have no idea.
“Impossible,” he said. “I’ve been Romeo in it all afternoon. I couldn’t be Rebecca in it now.”
I do not need to recount the whole argument, since I am sure it is obvious how it was going to end. Everything ended as it always ends, with all the children leaving, Fred wearing my paisley shirt, and Rob and I washing everything up, putting left-overs into empty cream cheese cartons. At last I left Rob at the kitchen table doing paperwork into the night, while I went to bed after a long soak in the bath. I hadn’t started the application I’d promised to write for Rob, but I doubted it was the application keeping him up.
It was some time in the very middle of the night when I was woken up by the quietest sound of padding paws. I lay very still as the padding came closer and closer and just murmured the quietest murmur of encouragement I could, and then there was the thump of a cat landing on the bed.
“That’s not Jessica, is it?” Rob said, waking up too.
“No,” I said, “go back to sleep.”
“It is,” said Rob, but sleepily enough that I wasn’t worried.
In fact I’d been telling the complete truth when I said it wasn’t Jessica, who wasn’t allowed on the bed but had already crept under the covers before Rob had come to bed and was curled up now against my stomach.
“Shhh,” I said to her, as she stiffened under my hand and made the smallest of growls.
But she knew better than to make much noise when infiltrating the bed, and a little stroking persuaded a reluctant purr from her, soon joined by a louder purr from further down the bed as George settled himself at my feet.
I moved one foot over to touch Rob’s, who gave it a small answering nudge as he started snoring. If George had got out of the laundry, I thought, that must mean the laundry door was open, and that must mean Molly had come home in the night, coming in as she does through the laundry at the back of the house.
And I think I did know then how happy I felt to be lying awake in the night, with both the cats on the bed, Rob asleep and Molly home. I thought, I ought to think about my After Apple-Picking series. I ought to have some ideas for what I will say in the zoom interview. Instead, I thought about a translation question Molly had been puzzling over, how the word aeneous could have meant bronze-coloured as in “brassy or golden green.” Rob had pointed out that the copper in bronze turns green when it oxidises, but this didn’t seem much of an answer to me. It’s the wrong shade of green entirely, a blue-green, not a golden green. If Homer could describe the sky as bronze and the sea as wine-dark, was he even talking about colour the way we saw colour? It is as if one culture hearing an orchestra was listening only to the pitch of the notes, and another culture was listening to the sounds the different instruments were making, so a description of the sound an oboe makes is met with the bewildered response that it sounds like a description of C# yet surely the note is more of an A. I suddenly felt tremendously excited at the idea of seeing the world in terms of texture instead of colour, not texture as in fabric but texture in terms of the way light reflects off objects, a world of various degrees of shimmer and shine, depth and detail.
I tried to work out how I could photograph such a vision of the world. Not in black and white, I thought, but I needed to capture the reflection of light without the focus being on colour. Perhaps muted colours, or different colours to the actual colours, or a combination of both muted and different, subtly different, like the difference between golden-green and the green of oxidation, and then to capture the different textures I would make an enormous photograph collaged out of the same photograph taken over and over using different film stocks, and printed on all different types of paper textures, very neatly and precisely joined. I would include a description from Homer that had been taken as a description of colour, and was really a description of light-texture, as part of the title of every image, and I was so eager to get started I almost considered getting up right away and waking Molly to ask for her Homer so I could begin reading. But that would have risked disturbing the cats, so I just lay there stroking Jessica, thinking about how good my first cup of coffee was going to be in the morning.
“You don’t know how happy you are,” is what my sister Hillary told me, and it is true I did not know how happy I was eight days earlier when the cat was missing, the light was about to move out of the room I needed to shoot in, I couldn’t reach the wire to hang up one of the floor-to-ceiling photographs I needed to hang, I was still waiting for Molly to collect the other one, and no one was anywhere, Rob wasn’t answering my texts and Molly doesn’t have a phone. It used to be the children who got anxious if I wasn’t there to be called on but at some point I had become the one who gets anxious when Fred and Molly aren’t home. The calmest I have been in years was during the autumn Covid lockdown when both of them were here all the time and I had to hide out in the studio to get away. Now Fred has returned to living in the large and mouldy house he shares with three flatmates, and I hardly see much more of Molly who is taking every subject the university offers even though she is far too busy with community activism to get to any of her classes. So I’m left with only my own two hands which aren’t enough for almost anything I want to do and I’ve had too many years of basically being a six-handed person to adjust back to two hands. This particular afternoon, for instance, how was I going to hold the cat cage open while also holding a cat?
Then Fred’s friend Jay’s battered looking red car pulled in to the drive and though it wasn’t Molly’s friend’s boyfriend’s van, as I was expecting, I could see the rolled-up photographs sticking out of one of the back-seat windows, which was a relief though an alarming way for the photographs to travel particularly since it was Fred, rather than Jay, driving the car. Molly bounded out of the car’s front seat, and I flinched to see her trying to open the back door with the photographs still leaning of the window, but by the time I raced out to try and direct operations Fred had got the photographs out through the other side of the car with the help of Molly’s friend Stella. I took the other end of the roll from Stella who was still somewhat crumpled up in the car where she’d been sitting squashed by the photographs, and backed carefully towards the house, shouting at Molly to shut the gate in case the cat had got into the garden, not that the gate would be likely to contain him if he had, and realising I’d left the front door of the house open so shouting at Molly to also keep an eye on the front door.
“I’m keeping an eye on the front door,” said Fred. “I’m walking towards it.”
“And if you see him let me know!” I shouted to Molly.
“Through it,” Fred updated me.
“But don’t shout or you’ll frighten him!” I shouted at Molly, and told Fred to kick the door shut behind him, since I was pretty sure the cat was inside, really.
“Through to the living room,” I instructed Fred, “Don’t trip on Molly’s books.”
Instead he tripped on the cat who came rushing out of the living room as soon as I opened the living room door. I hadn’t looked for him there already because the door had been shut, which should have meant he couldn’t get in to it but instead meant he hadn’t been able to get out and was now so desperate to escape that he tripped up Fred who fell right on top of the roll of photographs.
“Fred!” I wailed, as the front door opened, and “Shut the door! Don’t come in!” to Molly, who came in and tripped on the cat, and to Stella, who backed away as the cat fled out the front door and fell backwards down the steps.
“Well, that’s three months work ruined,” I said.
“It’s only my wrist broken,” Fred said, “the photographs are fine.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Get off them?”
They were surprisingly unscathed. Fred actually had managed to take most of his weight on his wrist, and only dented the outside layer of photographs very slightly. Luckily that was one of the ones for Stella’s production, not my one for the rest home.
“Come and have a look,” I called to Molly and Stella.
“What about the cat?” asked Fred.
“Can you catch the cat?” I called to Molly and Stella, pulling the photographs through to the living room.
There were four of them, the three backdrops for the play and the street view we were going to hang at the end of the rest home corridor, which I wanted to pose the cat in front of, to take another photo of it with the cat in. It was an extremely costly detail to add, and now I’d lost the cat. But the photo had worked out beautifully, with a very slightly uncanny glow to the colours, the pink of the rhododendrum where Diana had lived particularly vivid, and the leaves lit up and shiny.
Fred isn’t particularly tall, but he is taller enough than I am that when on tiptoes on a dining room chair he can reach the wire I had hanging across the top of the wall, to peg up the photographs. I got him to peg both up, the one I’d tried to peg up in the morning and the one I’d sent Molly to fetch. Masking tape at the bottom secured them flat enough to the wall for me to be able to work with them, and I checked the distance through the viewfinder of my camera one more time. I shot a couple with Fred in, just because I love taking photographs of Fred, one with him looking seriously towards me and one camping it up for the camera, a ringlet falling across his face. Now all I needed was the cat.
I was hoping Molly might have found him, but she was still sitting with Stella on the front steps. She’d evidently gone inside at one point because there was a wet cloth on the ground, a packet of bandaids and a snowstorm of bandaid wrappers which I would have thought were against her anti-packaging principles but I resisted saying anything when I saw how tear-stained Stella’s face was.
“You’re not seriously hurt?” I asked.
“I’m heart-broken,” Stella said, setting off a whole new course of tears.
“James?”
“Ugh!” she replied through her tears, which I thought was a good sign, really. James did quite often break up with her. They’d been together since they were thirteen, from the first day of high school, which I knew not because Stella and Molly were particular friends back then but because the longstandingness of this relationship was legendary. James and Stella were so legendary a couple I suspected they had got a bit trapped in their own legendariness, though James, at least, wasn’t so trapped he wasn’t able to break up with her from time to time.
“Come inside. I’ll warm up some rolls or something, and make tea.”
“It’s more a gin sort of break up,” said Molly.
“The gin got drunk the last gin sort of break up.”
Fred was already heating scones I’d forgotten were left over from yesterday, in the microwave which would leave them a little limp but still nicer than cold. They were date scones but I would hold off having the argument about eating jam with them (Molly was already getting the jam out of the fridge). I got out the big, solid cream-coloured tea-pot, figuring this was, if not a gin sort of break up, at least serious enough for the largest tea-pot. Stella really was miserable, she had a kind of dazed, blank look about her, and when I put a cup of tea infront of her, she clung to it with both her hands, staring into the tea cup, without drinking it. Before Rob, the longest I’d ever been with anyone was six months, and I remembered the feeling of ongoing panic I’d felt when we broke up, and Stella had been with James for so long it was part of who she was. And perhaps I was wrong to think of that as a problem, the way everyone said having children too young was a problem but I thought it was a good idea so that the whole undoing of yourself could happen without too much of yourself to undo and you could be your reconstructed self in the life you were going to make next, such as this life of sitting drinking tea with a girl too miserable even to drink tea.
“So, what happened?” I asked, putting an unwanted scone on her plate (without jam).
“He is too busy to play Romeo,” she said.
“Metaphorically? Or literally?”
“Both! And the play is in two weeks!”
“And when I think of everything we have been doing for him!” said Molly. “The times we stayed up fitting in bits of wood that didn’t fit in, the article Stella wrote, all the photography!”
Though the photography was me, of course, I didn’t add.
“Yes, but it was all for nothing,” Stella said.
“He can’t blame you for the pandemic!”
“He doesn’t! He doesn’t!” she wept, still defending him. “It’s true, though, he is really busy. His whole marketing thing has to be rewritten for uni but also, his whole – his whole – ”
“He has to rethink his marketing plans,” Molly explained.
“He was, he was...” Stella wept, “on the verge of success!”
I did know some of this already, having been quite invested in James’s furniture designs, and as excited as anyone when they were going to be taken up by a New York design store. Store isn’t quite the word for Freemans, not a gallery, but not just a store. It really meant something, to have furniture showing at Freemans. More orders would have surely followed, and there was going to be a big publicity push, all cancelled.
“I still don’t see why he has to break up with you,” I said.
“He didn’t!” Stella wept, “I broke up with him!”
“Oh!” I said. “Well, then, can’t you un-break up with him?”
“Mum!” said Molly and Fred at the same time.
“That makes it much harder,” Fred said, at the same time as Molly said, “She doesn’t want to.”
“I’m not going to,” Stella said, “even if I do want to.”
“Which you don’t,” Molly said.
“I can’t. It’s over. It really is, this time. It just....is,” Stella said, and the finality of it was somehow underlined by her stopping crying, and starting to drink her tea.
“So we might not even need the backdrops,” said Molly.
“Of course you’ll need the backdrops,” I said.
“We don’t have a Romeo!”
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” sighed Fred, as anyone would, though not as well as Fred.
“I don’t even care about the play anymore,” Stella said. “I hate the play.”
“Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. (Or a Capulet),” Fred said, kindly. “What's Montague? (Or Capulet?) It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man. (Or girl.)”
“O, be some other name! What's in a name?” continued Stella, sounding very prettily like Juliet despite her new-found hatred of the play. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”
“So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title,” concluded Fred, with a flourish.
“How come you know that?” Stella asked.
“Fred was the lead in the school production of Romeo and Juliet when he was in Year 10!” Molly said, still proud and a little astonished at the heights Fred had once reached.
“Were you Romeo?” Stella asked, looking, I thought, very slightly hopeful.
“No, Juliet,” said Fred. “But I did know most of Romeo’s lines as well, I had to, I was constantly having to prompt Alex.”
“How long would it take you to learn them again?” Stella asked, definitely looking hopeful.
But the negotiations were interrupted by a terrible yowling outside.
“Oh, help, it’s Jessica!” I cried. “We have to do something!”
Jessica is our own cat, a magnificent cat in her own way, but she has no tolerance at all for other cats.
“We can’t possibly lose Diana’s cat!” I said. “Not before I’ve photographed him!”
“Mum!” (Just Molly this time.)
“Or afterwards! But quick, do something!”
But be quick and do what I would have had no idea if Molly hadn’t taken command. The two cats, Jessica and George, were facing each other, bristling, on the largest branch of the kaka beak tree, which ran exactly above the fence, so that George was equally likely to leap onto the road side as the garden side. Molly positioned Stella inside the garden where the cat might head if he leapt inwards, she herself took a position just outside the fence in case he leapt outwards, having instructed Fred to remove Jessica from the tree while I was supposed to gently creep up on George and, ideally, fold him tenderly into my arms. But while I was creeping he leapt from the tree onto the fence, and when Fred ran towards the fence he leapt outwards, as Molly had predicted, and if Molly hadn’t been ready for him that would probably have been the last time we ever saw him.
I would have liked to have seen the catch, but by the time we got out the gate we found Molly lying on the ground, both arms around the cat, tensed with his ears flattened and ready to spring away if she released her hold a fraction. She was completely unable to move. Somehow, between us, we got Molly, and the cat, up off the ground and into the house, and we shut all the doors between the kitchen and the outdoors before Stella dared to hold open the cat cage, and Molly wrestled the cat in.
“Well done,” I said, as she peered in to the cage. “But put the lid down, please.”
“Are those my Greek notes?” she asked.
“Oh, maybe,” I said. I had lined the cat cage with something, I remembered, quite possibly the notes from Molly’s late night studying, which reminded me: “Don’t you have an exam this afternoon?”
Molly didn’t move. She was staring at her notes.
“Molly? Is it this afternoon?”
“I’ve missed my exam!”
“Well, no you haven’t. What time was it?”
“Oh my god it was 2 o’clock!” said Stella. “I’m so sorry!”
“It’s not your fault,” said Molly, still not getting up from the cat cage, or rather from the side of her notes.
“It’s not even three yet! Fred, you can take Molly to her exam can’t you?”
“It’s too late!”
“Isn’t it a three hour exam?”
“Yes, but...”
“Have you ever needed three hours for an exam?” I asked her.
“Yes!”
“You haven’t! You always finish early!”
“I need my notes,” she said, eyeing the cage.
“You do not need your notes. You are not opening the cage. You know you know everything, you knew everything before you even started studying last night, Fred, where are the keys?”
He jangled them at me.
“Quick, then, velocius quam asparagi conquantur,” I said, which is Latin for quicker than you can cook asparagus, a thing we say in our family. “But you’ll come back afterwards?”
“Is Dad coming back?” Molly asked.
“Molly,” Fred said, in a chastising tone.
He didn’t really need the chastising tone, but it is true it used to drive me wild when Molly always used to ask when Dad was coming home, every time he went away, or even when he was just at work. I think she liked to ask as often as she did to work me up, which is partly what used to work me up. The children liked to think I was jealous of Rob, and would say “now I really love Dad best!” whenever I snapped at them for asking yet again when he was coming home, but I don’t think I was. I’ve got a notebook in a drawer from the time Molly took up spying which I treasure for its three entries:
Fred. Brown hair. Good at drawing.
Dad. Eating toast. 9.7.06. Newpaper reading 1.25 pm. Short dark hair. Brown and red stripey t-shirt. Patch of hair on his lip under his nose he missed shaving. Smells salty. Blows his nose a lot. Saw me (good at hearing) (or seeing) Crinkled black socks. “Not going to say anything.”
Mum. Is a photographrer.
“Dad will be back,” was all I said, checking facebook again for a message from him. Whether he would actually be back I had no idea because the only messages, dozens of them, were all from my sister. She’d been sending messages all day but I’d only looked at the occasional last line of one, because if I opened them Hillary would see I had seen them and hadn’t replied which would lead to a further barrage of messages and probably an actual phone call. There seemed to be the combination of “what do I do” questions and “so how can that be my fault?” questions that generally heralded another relationship breakdown and a desperate need for long talks about the impossibility of her doing anything at all, long talks during which I was not allowed to say anything because anything I said made her furious, except that it also made her furious if I didn’t say anything. I love my sister but I really did not want to talk to her. “I just do feel quite desperate,” she had written, followed by “I haven’t heard otherwise,” followed by, “So shall I call you?” “Don’t call now, crisis here as usual, can you call later on?” I wrote back.
“Are you coming, Stella?” Fred was asking.
Stella looked uncertain. There was no time for her to decide.
“She can stay here,” I said. “You’ll come back afterwards, won’t you? You can pick Molly up afterwards, can’t you Fred?”
“I can take a bus,” Molly said.
“But you’ll need to come back for Stella,” I said.
“I can go with Fred,” Stella said. “We could take the backdrops to the hall, maybe try out some lines?”
“There’s no time for the backdrops!” I said.
“But we could try out some lines,” Fred said.
“Go then!” I said. “Go, go! But come back afterwards, I’m cooking for all of you.”
I shooed them out the door and stood in the doorway just making sure they did drive away, then went back inside thinking I should actually do something. I wandered into the living room to check on the light. I would ordinarily use artificial light, and I probably would in the end for this too, but there was a moment in the day when the whole room had a kind of golden glow, and yesterday a shaft of sunlight just touched the edge of George’s fur lighting him up in the most miraculous way the second before he jumped off the box and ran away the first time. I’d missed that moment today, and in any case George was in no state to pose and I would be too nervous to try without a back-up crew to catch him should he run away again. The photograph was actually perfect without the cat in it. I rolled out the backdrops for the play and they, too, were perfect, with the same slightly unreal looking colours.
I would go through Hillary’s messages properly when I got back from the supermarket, I decided, but before I could go to the supermarket I needed to find one of the masks Molly had made and sold to me (fundraising for the hall) or, failing that, the disposable ones I’d bought months ago from the supermarket and which must be somewhere in the house. This turned out to involve cleaning out all the bathroom cupboards – it was amazing how many empty packets and curled up tubes we kept in there – and going through all the sock drawers trying to match single socks and, finally, though how I got there I don’t know, taking all the books out of the bookcase in the hall and polishing the book shelf shelves. Then suddenly it was late and there wasn’t even time to go to the supermarket, or not unless I really rushed, and there would be no time when I got back. I checked facebook again just to see if there was anything from Rob or Fred and to make sure Hillary hadn’t reached too high a pitch of desperation. Nothing from Rob or Fred, and from Hillary just “I can call later on, just tell me if its okay,” which didn’t sound too desperate at all. “Things on tonight so perhaps call tomorrow?” I replied, searching for my wallet and some bags. “Ok so that’s ok then?” Hillary had replied when I looked again, and I threw in a quick “Yes! That would be great!” before I dashed out the door, leaving behind my polished bookshelves.
When I got back from the supermarket – I was going to roast everything that had ever lived below ground – the red car was just pulling in. Fred had not only brought Molly and Stella back but also Jay, who was in fact driving their own car this time. Everyone seemed to be extremely buoyant, Fred and Jay both so much so that I almost wondered, as I had used to wonder a long time ago, whether he and Jay might be more than friends, except that Fred has never seemed to need to be more than friends with anyone. Molly’s exam had obviously gone well (of course it had gone well) and even Stella was looking less devastated than she had earlier.
“Is Dad back?” Molly asked, partly asking, partly teasing.
“You can check for messages,” I said, handing her the phone.
Molly resists the attention economy by not having a phone of her own but she doesn’t have a problem checking my phone, and for someone resisting the attention economy, I can’t think of anyone who pays more attention, to world politics, local politics, and everyone around her, while also attending to the most arcane details of ancient Roman and Greek languages and culture.
“A lot of messages from Hillary,” Molly observed. Then the phone actually rang and Molly inconsiderately answered it, which didn’t worry me nearly as much as it should have because she almost simultaneously said, “Dad!” I was therefore taken off guard when she handed the phone over to me and I found myself talking to Hillary, while Molly raced to the gate to greet Rob who got to hear all the details of the exam while I was stuck on the phone. I was only half listening to Hillary as she listed everything that was terrible about her life, while half listening to Stella and Fred and Jay and finding them beers and putting the kettle on and unpacking the groceries. It would all have been much easier if I’d just put the phone down while I did all that but I kept it dutifully to my ear.
“Mum!” said Molly, “has the cat been in the cage all afternoon?”
Jessica came in after Molly – “shut the door,” I called to Rob – and seeing George in the cage froze, hissed and frothed up her fur.
“He doesn’t even have any water!” Molly said.
“He’s been asleep all afternoon!” I said.
“What?” said Hillary.
“The cat,” I said.
“Are you even listening?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Okay well I’ll see you on the fourteenth,” she said. “I’ll just message you the flight number. I can’t talk to you on the phone!”
And she hung up.
“Bread!” said Rob, pulling a loaf of bread out of a paper bag and holding on tight to it when Fred tried to take it. “And did you get a chance to draft my application?”
“She said flight number!” I said.
“What’s a dish I can give him some water in?” said Molly. “And has he been fed?”
“He honestly has been asleep,” I told her.
He was backing up into the corner of the cage now, fluffing up his own fur at Jessica and looking deeply anxious. “I think we need to remove Jessica.”
“Or move George. He can’t stay in the cage, Mum.”
Flight number?
“Could we put him in the laundry? Rob, do you know where the litter tray is? Or a box would do. Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner, Jay? Molly, can you hold the door open? Is there a cushion or something that won’t smell of Jessica?”
“All of the cushions smell of Jessica,” Molly said.
“Your pillows don’t.”
“He can’t have my pillows!”
“Just one! We can change the pillow case afterwards! Well, mine then, but then I’ll need to borrow one of yours.”
“What about a towel?” said Rob.
This was a good idea. We made him two bed options, using many towels, one on top of the washing machine because cats like heights, and one under the sink, in case George didn’t, and Molly got him a dish of cat biscuits while I filled a bowl with water for him. All this time George remained backed into the corner of his cage, showing no interest in coming out.
“Should we lift him out of the cage?” I wondered.
“He’s quite agile,” Molly said. “He’ll be able to get out when he wants to.”
So we left him in his cage, locked in the laundry, surrounded by all the amenities he would have access to should he decide to come out.
Jay was heading off, but they promised to come back to pick up Fred and anyone else who needed a lift later on, and I tried to persuade them to come back early enough that they could have something to eat with us, since there was going to be plenty. I chopped vegetables while Rob told us about his problems sourcing beds, and drank wine while I fried haloumi cheese, and listened again to Stella’s explanation of why James couldn’t play Romeo, in which she didn’t even mention the fact that they had broken up, and toasted pumpkin seeds for the pumpkin salad while Molly gave a moving account of a penguin trying to get out to sea on a piece of floating ice while being menaced by a seal.
“Flight number?” I thought, as I cleared some books and scissors, envelopes and vegetable bags, a milk bottle, Rob’s keys and Fred’s scarf off the table.
“The seal steered the ice floe further and further away from the other penguins until finally it had got the penguin where it wanted it, and came up for the kill,” Molly said, “and the penguin, which had been standing helplessly on the ice floe suddenly just turned round and glared at the seal and shouted at it, raark, raark, and the seal looked surprised” – I tried to imagine a surprised looking seal, and couldn’t quite – “and said ruh! ruh! back at the penguin, and the penguin stared it right in the eyes and said, raark! at it again, and the seal backed off a bit and said, ruh! and then they stared at each other for a bit, and then the seal made a move forwards again and the penguin said raark! and the seal said ruh! and then it turned round and slid back into the water and swam away.”
“I suppose you can’t really eat someone you’ve had a conversation with,” I said.
“Raark, raark!” said Fred, waving a potato at me.
“We’ll plant that one,” I said.
“I feel like the seal was probably telling the penguin about all the other murders it had committed,” Stella rather surprisingly chipped in.
There was only a moment’s pause and then Fred enthusiastically said, “I know! They always do that!” making me wonder where Fred got his knowledge of marine biology from.
(I knew where Molly got hers, from watching David Attenborough, which she’s been doing for years. When she was quite small she would use her David Attenborough voice to explain to herself our more puzzling behaviours, which sometimes did seem to access a more sophisticated knowledge of what was going on than she might otherwise have been able to articulate to herself. It could be quite unnerving.)
“It could have just eaten the penguin, but no...” Stella said.
“...fifteen minutes to go,” Fred continued, “and instead of ending it early, it has to fill in the time till the credits explaining every plot detail...”
But then they had to work out what the penguin could possibly have been saying to turn the seal around, while I finally forced myself to look back over Hillary’s messages. She had, in fact, been in quite a desperate mood while I’d been ignoring her messages all morning, which culminated in this exchange between us:
H: so I just need to get away!
H: I’m going to book flights.
H: Is it okay if I stay with you a couple of weeks?
H: I could stay in Fred’s room.
H: I am going out of my mind! I really need to hear from you!
H: Bridgid?
H: ok I am just going to book flights if I don’t hear otherwise from you.
H: I just do feel quite desperate.
H: I haven’t heard otherwise....
H: Shall I call you?
B: Don’t call now, crisis going on as usual, can you call later on?
H: I need to decide now!
H: I can call later on, just tell me if its okay.
B: I’ve just got a bit on today, perhaps call tomorrow?
H: Ok, so that’s okay then?
B: Yes! That would be great!
“Hillary is coming to stay and I told her it would be great!” I interrupted everyone.
There was a moment’s silence, then Molly tentatively asked why I’d said it would be great, while Rob asked if the vegetables were ready to come out of the oven.
“Rob!” I said. “Hillary! Is! Coming! To! Stay!”
“I’ll get them out,” he said. “Is there anything you need to do to them?”
“Aarrghhhh!”
“When exactly is she coming to stay?” Molly asked.
“She’s not coming to stay!” I said, getting up to toss the vegetables and everything together in a bowl.
Another message from Hillary came in, the promised flight details.
“The fourteenth? No! No she is not! That’s the night before the zoom interview!”
This meant I would be up all night talking and drinking and the next morning no matter how late she had stayed up, Hillary would get up just when I was on the laptop doing my interview and would drift in wearing some sort of silky something and would linger, and with her listening in the background I would be far too embarrassed to say anything at all.
“Fred, you have to have an emergency and need to move back home,” I said. “Your room cannot be empty.”
“But you hate her staying in the studio,” Rob pointed out.
“She can’t stay in the studio! I’ll tell her I’m using it! I’ll need it for the, I’ll have a deadline!”
“That won’t stop her,” Molly said.
“I’ll bomb it!” I said.
“You won’t bomb it and Fred’s not moving home and you’ll love having her and you’ll drink too much and I will do all the cooking and washing up,” said Rob.
“She can have my room if she likes, because I’m moving out,” said Molly.
“You’re not! You’re not allowed to, and you don’t even have to! Of course Fred will move home!”
“You can’t just use us as human shields,” said Molly.
“Who else can I use?” I cried, utterly exasperated.
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in!” I shouted, but it was Jay, so they were already coming in, with a couple of friends even.
Jay was looking completely marvellous, having changed out of the vinyl trousers, t-shirt and biker boots they were wearing earlier into a very short dress with pink and gold sequins, over blue tights, and with gold tinsel wrapped around their coppery hair, making it sort of surge up in wonderful waves.
“You look amazing!” I said. “All of you!”
No one looked as amazing as Jay, but it was true their friends did also look pretty amazing, one in a very low cut red dress with flounces galore and the other in a red satin dressing-gown with some kind of glitter paste making their beard sparkle.
“Poetry reading?” I guessed.
“Yes but we need someone to read Rebecca’s poem, she’s desperately ill with a slight cold,” Jay said. “This is Tui, by the way, and Ez.” (“Hello” said Tui shyly. “Yo,” said Ez.) “Fred? Could you? Please? Tui and Ez will be your back-up dancers.”
Molly was fetching chairs, Rob found extra plates, Fred was offering food and beer or wine. Jay was practically dancing on their feet, wanting to go, or at least to settle the question of Fred’s involvement, but Ez, who was already sitting in Molly’s seat before she had even got chairs for the others, took a plate from Rob and heaped it up at once with an amount of food I would have thought would take an hour to get through. Tui perched on the edge of a chair Molly offered her and sipped at a glass of wine.
“Do I have to know it off by heart?” Fred asked. “I can’t stand on the stage reading off a bit of paper.”
“You can, you can!” Jay said. “With Tui and Ez doing the dancing you totally can! And you know the poem, it is the one about the boy in the milking shed!”
“My favourite,” Fred said, in a swoony voice. Then he snapped back into his hardest negotiating tones, directed, however, not at Jay but at me.
“I will totally have to wear the paisley shirt, though,” he said.
“You can’t!” I said. “I’m not lending it till...”
“...after the zoom thing,” Fred said. “No, but please, Mum, you actually will have to.”
Fred loves my paisley shirt, which he has worn about a dozen times for every time I have ever worn it. He probably loves it for the diaphonous texture of the material and for its wonderful combination of golds and greens and bronze, and I love it because it is like a pyjama shirt, with piping even, while being an actual shirt you can wear in the world, but in any case, we both love it, and he knew, he knew, I had to wear it for my zoom interview.
“What’s wrong with the shirt you are wearing now?” I said. “It’s perfect! It’s magnificent! It’s – piratical!”
It was a magnificent shirt – a white blouse that puffed out marvellously with big sleeves and narrow cuffs. How Fred finds these things I have no idea.
“Impossible,” he said. “I’ve been Romeo in it all afternoon. I couldn’t be Rebecca in it now.”
I do not need to recount the whole argument, since I am sure it is obvious how it was going to end. Everything ended as it always ends, with all the children leaving, Fred wearing my paisley shirt, and Rob and I washing everything up, putting left-overs into empty cream cheese cartons. At last I left Rob at the kitchen table doing paperwork into the night, while I went to bed after a long soak in the bath. I hadn’t started the application I’d promised to write for Rob, but I doubted it was the application keeping him up.
It was some time in the very middle of the night when I was woken up by the quietest sound of padding paws. I lay very still as the padding came closer and closer and just murmured the quietest murmur of encouragement I could, and then there was the thump of a cat landing on the bed.
“That’s not Jessica, is it?” Rob said, waking up too.
“No,” I said, “go back to sleep.”
“It is,” said Rob, but sleepily enough that I wasn’t worried.
In fact I’d been telling the complete truth when I said it wasn’t Jessica, who wasn’t allowed on the bed but had already crept under the covers before Rob had come to bed and was curled up now against my stomach.
“Shhh,” I said to her, as she stiffened under my hand and made the smallest of growls.
But she knew better than to make much noise when infiltrating the bed, and a little stroking persuaded a reluctant purr from her, soon joined by a louder purr from further down the bed as George settled himself at my feet.
I moved one foot over to touch Rob’s, who gave it a small answering nudge as he started snoring. If George had got out of the laundry, I thought, that must mean the laundry door was open, and that must mean Molly had come home in the night, coming in as she does through the laundry at the back of the house.
And I think I did know then how happy I felt to be lying awake in the night, with both the cats on the bed, Rob asleep and Molly home. I thought, I ought to think about my After Apple-Picking series. I ought to have some ideas for what I will say in the zoom interview. Instead, I thought about a translation question Molly had been puzzling over, how the word aeneous could have meant bronze-coloured as in “brassy or golden green.” Rob had pointed out that the copper in bronze turns green when it oxidises, but this didn’t seem much of an answer to me. It’s the wrong shade of green entirely, a blue-green, not a golden green. If Homer could describe the sky as bronze and the sea as wine-dark, was he even talking about colour the way we saw colour? It is as if one culture hearing an orchestra was listening only to the pitch of the notes, and another culture was listening to the sounds the different instruments were making, so a description of the sound an oboe makes is met with the bewildered response that it sounds like a description of C# yet surely the note is more of an A. I suddenly felt tremendously excited at the idea of seeing the world in terms of texture instead of colour, not texture as in fabric but texture in terms of the way light reflects off objects, a world of various degrees of shimmer and shine, depth and detail.
I tried to work out how I could photograph such a vision of the world. Not in black and white, I thought, but I needed to capture the reflection of light without the focus being on colour. Perhaps muted colours, or different colours to the actual colours, or a combination of both muted and different, subtly different, like the difference between golden-green and the green of oxidation, and then to capture the different textures I would make an enormous photograph collaged out of the same photograph taken over and over using different film stocks, and printed on all different types of paper textures, very neatly and precisely joined. I would include a description from Homer that had been taken as a description of colour, and was really a description of light-texture, as part of the title of every image, and I was so eager to get started I almost considered getting up right away and waking Molly to ask for her Homer so I could begin reading. But that would have risked disturbing the cats, so I just lay there stroking Jessica, thinking about how good my first cup of coffee was going to be in the morning.
