Limestone and Clay (23 page)

Instead he finds the warmth he seeks in bed. Only for a time. He will not spend all day in bed. But there is still warmth there, left in the quilt by his body and by Nadia's. It is good to breathe in her scent. The sheet is rumpled and stained over and over by their love-making. He wants her all the time, wants to burrow into her, the warm softness, the easiness. He cannot get enough of the way she holds him inside her and then lets him go, of the loose loving slip-slide of it. It is such a simple thing, but so profound. It is his only relief.

He closes his eyes against the sunshine that taunts him for being there between the sheets like a sick person. He is bothered by a memory, something that is preventing him from moving forward. It is something he does not tell Nadia, that rises in his dreams, and bobs beneath the surface in the waking time, nudging sometimes almost up into the light, and he yearns to give a name to it. He yearns so hard that he finds his fingers clutching the thinness of air. It bobs below the surface, domed and hollow, a white calcite glimmer in the deep utter darkness; and the white skull grin of recognition which his mind protects him from has remained submerged except in the helpless flailing of his dreams.

But now in the space between sleep and waking he is jerked, as if by a hand in his hair, upright. There is a rearing in his mind, a fusion of memory and dream. The white stone that he saw in the passage before him was Roland's skull. Oh yes, it could have been a stone, it could have been an illusion, some flicker, a memory of light playing on his retina, it could have been many things. But he knows that it was Roland.

Nadia walks between people, across roads, only vaguely registering her purpose, so absorbed is she in her feelings. There is the anger, and to her surprise a sort of boredom with the way it grinds on and on, over and over. And there is the longing for a child, which is constant – but even that has become confused. She no longer necessarily sees herself and Simon with a child. The child is as important as ever: Simon, perhaps not. And this thought sets up a dull ache inside her, a guilty throb.

Often she dreams about suckling a child. Sometimes it is Sophie but sometimes another baby, unknown but familiar. Sometimes it is a tiny swaddled Simon. Once she woke sweating and trembling from a dream in which she realised that the baby she was suckling was a crow, its tiny wet rosebud lips protruding from its beak. Her breasts smart when she wakes from these dreams and she lies on her front to squash them against the mattress, squash away the sensation.

Nadia's feet have carried her to Celia's street, a row of red-brick terraces most of which have peeling paintwork and radical posters in their windows. She hesitates outside Celia's, noticing things: the constellation of dandelions amongst the grass, the milkbottles by the front door, clean and wet and bubbly. Celia or Dan must just have put them out. The garden is a mess but this house is painted more smartly than the others in the street and there are tulips in a vase on the windowsill.

How smug she must be feeling in there, how pleased, brewing up the child, filling the house with flowers. Nadia has been here before, been before and looked, not stood and gawped but walked past, shot oblique glances, but now she hesitates outside. There is something she wants to know. Dan might be there, of course, as well as, or instead of, Celia, which would be more awkward.
More
awkward!

The wrought-iron gate grates on the concrete as she pushes it open. She rings the bell and waits, but the house is settled and empty. No Celia or Dan, no sense of any stirring within. Nadia starts to go but turns back. She is fired up now. She wants to get in. Better if the house is empty. It makes it all the easier if she can only get in. She is not entirely sure what it is she needs to know. But it is something contained in Celia's house, some clue that she needs in order to continue: to know
how
to continue. She tries the front door but of course it is locked. She goes down the passage to the back of the house. Here, a yellow nylon tracksuit – Celia's? Dan's? – sways on the washing line above the small weedy lawn. Someone has been halfheartedly gardening. There is a turned-over strip and a seed packet stuck on a twig. The back door is locked, but the key is in the most obvious of places, under a plant pot beside the door.

She has never broken into a house before. But this is not breaking in. Breaking in suggests something smashed, a window, a lock. But it is trespass. It is even criminal. And it is thrilling. She could desecrate the place. What is it they do, the breakers and enterers? Shit on the carpet, smear obscenities on the walls. But, of course, she won't do that. She will only snoop. The key sticks in the lock. She has to pull the door towards her to make it turn. And then she is in.

It is not quiet. Washing sloshes sudsily in the machine, the refrigerator hums. There is a strong smell of paint. The kitchen is very clean. There is masses of fruit arranged in a wide china bowl, polished apples, bananas snuggled in a yellow bunch, fat white grapes. So much fruit for two people, and so perfect it looks plastic. Nadia opens the fridge. There is juice, milk, wine, cheese, salad stuff, half a chicken carcass covered in foil. She picks off a shred and chews it. It tastes of nothing. She sucks the grease off her fingers and closes the door. There is no clue.

The dining room and sitting room both have a stiff, newly decorated air. The smell of paint and new carpets is overwhelming. A flowering azalea competes with flowery curtains, and the tulips she noticed from outside stretch their snouts disdainfully upwards. On the sofa is a heap of green and blue wool, needles and a knitting pattern for a baby's hat. There are only a few rows on one needle and the wool is wiggly as if it has been much knitted and unravelled. Nadia is pleased to find that Celia is not as good at knitting as she is at everything else.

She goes upstairs. She looks in the bathroom at Celia's hypoallergenic cleansers and moisturisers, Dan's shaving cream, ointment for a skin condition, the two newish toothbrushes, their heads resting companionably together. There is no grime. Even the towels are folded. The toilet paper matches the blind. There is a dish of pot-pourri on top of the cistern. Nadia catches sight of her frowning face in the mirror, the unfamiliar red cloud of her hair. She hears a noise downstairs and freezes, her face a comic grimace.

Crazily, she's hardly considered being caught. What on earth could she say? She strains her ears for further sounds, footsteps, doors, voices, but there is nothing. The washing machine begins to spin, a high-pitched whirligig sound. She goes to the top of the stairs and looks down. There is no movement. No sense that anyone is in the house. It was only the washing machine shifting cycles. And anyway, she has rights of sorts. She has the advantage of having been wronged.

Nevertheless she hurries. It is the bedroom that is the important place, and she goes there now. The bed with its wicker headboard is huge and flat, made tidily with a white lace bedspread over the quilt. There are lace curtains at the windows. A pretty room, calm. She approaches the bed, touches the pillows, then pulls back the quilt. The linen is all pale blue and smooth and cool, quite clean except for one long pale Celia hair. On a cupboard on one side of the bed are a clock-radio, a lamp and a pile of motoring magazines. On the other is a glass of water with dust floating on the top, a bottle of vitamin pills and a pile of books – P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham. She picks up the top one, which has a shopping list stuck into it as a bookmark. She pulls it out and reads:
deodorant, courgettes, basil, bog cleaner, whipping cream
. She sticks it back, deliberately in the wrong place. She lies down on Celia's side of the bed. This is where Simon's child was conceived.

There's a round glass lampshade on the ceiling. Did they have the light on or off? The bed is firm, she bounces herself a bit. The wicker headboard creaks. That was the sound they will have heard while they were doing it. She opens her legs. Did they do it like this? she wonders. That is what Celia implied, the most efficient, medical sort of position. But who knows? And afterwards Celia lay with her knees up waiting for Dan to come in and fuck her. Reclaim her. And what was Nadia doing at the time, so unaware? She waits for the anger, clenches herself against it, but it fails to hit her, or pokes her only gently, a frayed old fish now, brushing her with its ragged fins. She catches sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror and gets up quickly, feeling absurd. She straightens the bed.

On top of a large chest of drawers there are more books, two about pregnancy and some pamphlets about nutrition. Nadia recognises these, she has some at home – followed their advice during her five-month pregnancy, for all the good it did her. There are also two old toys, a bald eyeless bear and a one-eared rabbit, its pink stuffing leaking from its worn-out paws. The rabbit's eyes are bright glass, round and scoffing. She looks away.

The top drawer is full of underwear, Celia's and Dan's together. So utterly intimate. Celia's underwear is surprising, all white cotton, childish: bras with wide straps, waist-high knickers. All white – true white, like something from an advertisement for washing powder – nothing grey, and all ironed by the look of it. Nadia grimaces, thinking of her own scraggy tumble of colours and shapes, all mended straps and tatty lace. And then there are Dan's boxer shorts, pale blue and dark blue, ironed and folded, nestling against Celia's knickers. So companionable. So, somehow, trusting.

Nadia is moved and repelled. There is a card on top of the chest of drawers, a picture of a koala bear and its cub. Inside is written
To both of you, with all my love for ever
. Nadia winces, at the purity, the naïvety, the nakedness of love and hope. All my love for ever, she mouths. For ever. And yes, looking round at the order, the evidence of love, care, co-operation and of anticipation, Nadia can almost believe it. She is an intruder, a violator, a rat in a doll's house: ruiner of order. But no, for there is no ruin. There is only a leaching of secrecy and of privacy, and that will never be known. She looks away from the rabbit to the soft blank eyesockets of the bear. One is Celia's and one Dan's, she guesses, grey snuggling relics of their childhood. She looks again at the bed where Simon came one night when she was unaware and then came home to her. It is only a flat white bed, a slab of upholstery. She leaves the room, looks back. There is nothing of herself here but a smudged reflection, and that she effaces with the closing of the door.

She stops half-way down the stairs, convinced that someone is in the kitchen: someone, Celia or Dan. Or even a burglar, a bona fide burglar. The stair she stands on creaks. She clenches her fists and bites her knuckles, tasting the saltiness of her skin, waiting. But the sounds are only the sounds of a house going about its electrical business. The fridge switches itself off, the washing machine lurches into silence, there is a gurgle in a distant pipe. There is no other movement, no shadows moving on the shiny wooden floor. Nadia dares herself to go down. And there is no one there.

She leaves the house quickly, her fingers clumsy and slippery, fumbling with the key. She stoops to replace it under the flower pot and then straightens and hurries off. The sun is hot on her face and the backs of her legs. As she walks down the street she senses the twitch of curtains, a stir of curiosity and outrage, but when she looks round there is nothing and no one, just the dusty gleam of windows. Truly, there is no one looking. She is just a small woman scurrying and no one is the least bit interested, or cares. And no one will ever know what she has done. How can they know? She has left no trace of her intrusion, but will there be a sense of uneasiness in the air? Surely Celia will feel it when she arrives home, surely she will sense a jarring, a not-quite-rightness? But nothing can be proved. And there is no harm.

Nadia slows her pace, relaxes her shoulders which have been hunched almost up to her ears, lets a slow breath down into her lungs. There
is
no harm. In fact, perhaps there is even good. Perhaps among all that evidence of love there is the clue she needed.
All my love. For ever. Both of you. For ever
. She stops to stroke a cat that melts like a spoonful of marmalade on a sunny wall. It presses its triangular face against her hand, purring deliriously. Yes. Good has been done. Nadia tickles the cat's ears. Dan and Celia are together. No evidence of any rift. No scrap of Simon to be seen. And the baby effectively Dan's.
To both of you. For ever
. Nadia is comforted by those words, which have never been spoken to her. Which are actually nonsense, for what is ‘ever'? And who can promise it? But it is the promising that is crucial. Simon would never say that to her.
For the foreseeable future
is more like it. Now, perhaps he would, perhaps he has changed enough to say that. But does she want him, changed? She strokes the cat from the top of its head, down the hot fur of its back to the tip of its tail and then walks on.

On the way home, she stops at the supermarket to buy Simon some strawberry yoghurt, bananas and custard tarts, all the sweet babyish things he craves as he lies on the sofa all day, watching schools broadcasts on the television. Standing in a queue at the check-out, she is amazed at herself, at how she had the nerve to do what she did. She feels dirty, as if there are smuts on her face; her hands are grimy and hot. But as far as it is possible to see, there is no danger of Celia wanting Simon. That is good. A sort of relief. She fidgets behind a woman who fumbles with her chequebook, drops her pen, tries to chat to the dazed-looking assistant. Somewhere behind her a baby wails, a thin and desperate sound. She looks round and meets the eyes of the child, a solid baby with fat red cheeks, a white plume of hair and a demonic expression. But does
she
want Simon? Or doesn't she?

In order to please and surprise Nadia, Simon prepares lunch. Eggs Florentine and new potatoes. In the illustration in the cookery book, the eggs nestle in their spinach nest, glistening and buttery. There is a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. He wants it to be all ready when she gets home. If they had a garden he would lay a cloth on the lawn, a red and white checked cloth. If they had such a cloth. But still, it will surprise Nadia, this initiative, it might open her up to him again.