Postcards From Berlin (3 page)

He wipes her mouth and kisses the top of her head, penitent. He follows me back to the bathroom.

“OK,” he says. “You stay. It’s a damn shame, though, when they’ve paid for the tickets and everything. Especially when Mother
hasn’t been well.”

I think of them: Adrian, his affable father; and Gina, his mother, who favors a country casual look, although they live in
chic urbanity in Putney, who reads horticultural magazines and cultivates an esoteric window box, who reminisces at some length
about her former job as an orthodontist’s receptionist. There’s something about Gina I find difficult: I feel colorless, passive,
near her. It’s not anything she says; she’s always nice to me, says, You and Richard are so good together. Sometimes I feel
there’s a subtext that I’m so much more satisfactory than Sara, Richard’s highly assertive first wife. But it’s almost as
though it’s hard to breathe around Gina, like she uses up all the air.

“Daisy can write them a letter when she’s well,” I say.

“It’s not the same,” he says, frowning.

Richard’s intense involvement with his parents fascinates me. I know that’s how it must be for most people, to have your parents
there and on your side, to worry about them and care what they think about you; yet to me this is another country.

Sinead comes down when I’m making breakfast, still in her dressing gown but fully made up, with her Walkman. She takes one
earpiece out to talk to me.

“Cat, I really need your opinion. D’you think I look like a transvestite?”

“You look gorgeous.” I put an arm around her.

It’s part of my role with her, to be a big sister, a confidante, to be soft when Richard is stern.

“Are you sure my mascara looks all right?” she asks. “I’m worried my left eyelashes look curlier than my right ones.”

“You’re a total babe. Look, I’ve made you some toast.”

“How is she?” she asks then.

“I don’t think she can come.”

She sits heavily down at the table, a frown like Richard’s stitched into her forehead.

“Do I have to go, then?” she asks.

She’s cross. She’s too old to go to the pantomime without her little sister. Daisy was the heart of today’s outing, its reason
and justification: Without her, it doesn’t make sense.

I put my arm round her. “Just do it, my love. To please Granny and Granddad.”

“
Snow
fucking
White
,” she says. “Jesus.”

I overlook this. “You never know, you might enjoy bits of it.”

“Oh, yeah? You know what it’ll be like. There’ll be a man in drag whose boobs keep falling down and lots of
EastEnders
jokes, and at the end they’ll throw Milky Ways at us and we’re meant to be, like,
grateful
.”

She puts her earpiece back in without waiting for my response.

They leave at twelve, Sinead, now fully dressed in jeans, leather jacket, and her expensive Christmas trainers with air bubbles
in the soles, resigned. I go to Daisy’s room. She’s sitting up, writing something, and I briefly wonder if Richard was right
and I was too soft and I should have made her go. But she still has that stretched look.

She waves her clipboard at me. She’s made a list of breeds of cats she likes, in order of preference.

“I still want one,” she says.

“I know.”

“When can we, Mum?”

“One day,” I tell her.

“You always say maybe or one day,” she says. “I want to really know. I want you to tell me exactly.”

“Well, you know Dad isn’t too keen. But maybe — if you can feed it and everything.”

“You said it again,” she says, “
Maybe
. I hate maybe.”

I rearrange her pillows so she can lie down, and I read to her for a while, from a book of fairy tales I bought her for Christmas.
There’s a story about a princess who’s meant to marry a prince, but she falls in love with the gardener, and he shows her
secret things, the apricots warm on the wall, the clutch of eggs, blue as the sky, hidden in a pear tree. I read it softly,
willing her to sleep, but she just lies there listening. She’s pale, her skin almost translucent, with shadows like bruises
under her eyes. Maybe it’s my attention that’s keeping her awake. Eventually, I tell her I’m going to make a coffee.

When I look in on her ten minutes later, she’s finally drifted off, arms and legs flung out. There’s a randomness to it, as
though she was turning over and was suddenly snared by sleep. I put my hand on her forehead, and she stirs but doesn’t wake.
I feel a deep sense of relief, knowing the sleep will heal her.

This is an unexpected gift: an afternoon with nothing to do, with no one needing anything; a gift of time to be slowly unwrapped
and relished. I stand there for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house, which seems strange so soon after Christmas,
when these rooms have so recently been full of noise and people; it’s almost as though the house is alive and gently breathing.
Then I go up to the attic, moving slowly through the silence.

I push open the door. The scents of my studio welcome me: turps, paint, the musty, oversweet smell of dying flowers. From
one of the little arched windows I can see across the roofs toward the park. I lean there for a moment, looking out. There’s
a velvet bloom of dust on the sill; I rarely clean up here. I can see the tall bare trees and their many colors, pink, apricot,
purple, where the buds are forming at the ends of their branches, and the dazzling sky with a slow, silent airplane lumbering
toward Heathrow.

I put on the shirt I always wear up here. Richard doesn’t like to see me in it; he hates me in baggy clothes. But I welcome
its scruffiness and sexlessness, the way it says, Now I am painting, the way it defines me as someone who is engaged in this
one thing.

Here is everything I need: thick, expensive paper, and 4B pencils that make soft, smudgy lines, and acrylic paints, and watercolors
with those baroque names that I love — cadmium yellow and Prussian blue and crimson alizarin. And there are things I’ve collected,
postcards and pictures torn from magazines, a print I cut from a calendar — a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of an orchid, very
sexualized; I laughed when Sinead stared at it and raised one eyebrow and said, “She might as well have called it ‘Come on
in, boys.’” And there are pebbles from the beach at Brighton, and bits of wood from the park, and a vase of lilies I brought
up here when the petals started to fall.

I feel a kind of certainty. There’s a clear, dark purpose at the heart of me, a seriousness; today I will be able to work
well.

I pick up a piece of bark and see, in the thin golden light, that its soft dull brownness is made of many colors. I take out
the pastel crayons and start to draw, using the blues and reds I see there, melding them together. I love this — how you can
look intently at the quiet surfaces of things and see such vividness.

There’s a part of my mind that is focused, intent, and part that is floating free. Images drift through my mind, faces: Sinead
in her new Christmas makeup, pretty and troubled; Richard, thin-lipped, annoyed with me and with Daisy. They’ll be at the
pantomime by now. Snow White will be a soap star in a blond, extravagant wig, and the Queen perhaps a man in taffeta and corsets,
playing it for laughs. Yet she can be so scary, this Queen, like in the Disney film of
Snow White
I saw when I was a child: I remember her shadow, sharp as though cut with a blade, looming and filling the screen. And I
see Nicky at the carol singing, her eager face and her dancing reindeer earrings, and thinking of Nicky, I think too of Fergal
O’Connor. And as I think of him, immediately I’m touching him, putting out my hands and moving them over his face, his head,
feeling the precise texture of his skin. He is quite still, watching me. I feel the warmth of him through the palms of my
hands. This shocks me, the precision of this picture, when I wasn’t sure I even liked him.

I draw on, in the suspended stillness. The drawing takes shape, but I don’t know yet if it pleases me. For the moment, I’m
not judging it or wondering whether it’s any good or whether people will like it, just moving my hand on the page. There’s
a compulsion to it, as though I don’t have a choice. Soon the light will dim: Already pools of shadow are collecting in the
corners. I draw quickly, with rapid little strokes in many colors, wanting to get it finished before dark.

When the doorbell rings, I jump, I’m so lost in my own world, and the crayon makes a random jagged mark across the page. My
first impulse is not to go: It’s such a long way down. But then it rings again, and I worry that Daisy will wake, requiring
drinks and comfort, so I run down the two flights of stairs, through the gathering dark of the house.

It’s Monica, our neighbor.

“Sorry to disturb you,” she says.

She’s wearing a tracksuit and running shoes: She’s off for a jog in the park. Her two red setters are with her, milling around
at the foot of the steps. She’s bright-eyed and virtuous, and the cold has already brought a flush to her cheeks.

“That’s OK,” I tell her. “I was up in the attic.”

“While I’ve been drawing, the world has changed. There are sounds of water and a wet smell, and our breath smokes white in
the raw air. As we stand at the door, there’s a noise from the roof like tearing cloth, and a lump of snow slides off and
spatters on the gravel.

“Nice Christmas?”

“Great, thanks,” I say routinely.

Her hair is very short and in the dim light she has an androgynous, classical look: Diana hunting with her dogs, perhaps,
or some figure from a Greek frieze that I saw once with Richard in Athens, a taut young runner bringing news of slaughters
and defeats.

“These came for you while we were away,” she says.

She thrusts two envelopes at me. I glance down at them: One is for Daisy, with a local postmark, probably a school friend,
a child who was away at the end of term and missed the school postbox; the other comes from abroad and I recognize the writing.
I have to control an urge to thrust this letter straight back at Monica.

She watches me. Perhaps she sees some trouble in my face that she misreads as criticism.

“We’ve been away,” she says again, a bit apologetic. “Or I’d have brought them round earlier.”

“No, no. It’s fine. They’re just Christmas cards, anyway.”

“It wasn’t our usual postman,” she says.

She’s moving from one foot to the other, wired up and keen to be off. The dogs skulk and circle at the foot of the steps,
vivid and nervy, damp mouths open.

“Thanks anyway,” I tell her.

“We must have coffee sometime,” she says. As we always say.

“I’d like that.”

And she’s off, jogging down the steps, pounding across the damp gravel, the dogs streaming out in front of her.

I put Daisy’s card on the hall stand. I’ll take it to her when she wakes.

I go into the kitchen, sit at the table, hold the other envelope out in front of me. My heart is noisy. It enters my head
that this is why Daisy is ill: as though everything is connected, as though this letter brings ill fortune with it, clinging
like an unwholesome smell of past things, a smell of mothballs and stale cigarettes and old discarded clothing.

The house has lost its atmosphere of ease; it feels alert, edgy. I hear the little kitchen noises, a drumming like fingertips
in the central heating, the breathing of the fridge, and outside the creak and drip of the thaw. I tear at the envelope.

It’s a perfectly ordinary card: a Christmas tree, very conventional, with “Season’s Greetings” in gilt letters in German and
French and English.

I open it. At the top, an address, printed and underlined. The handwriting is careful, rather childlike.

“Trina, darling. ‘Someone we know’ gave me your address. What a stroke of luck!! The above is where I’m living now. Please
PLEASE write.”

There’s an assumption of intimacy about the way it isn’t signed that I resent and certainly don’t share. Like the way a lover
will say on the phone, It’s me.

I look at my hands clasped tight on the table in front of me. I notice them dispassionately, the way the veins stick out,
the pale varnish that is beginning to peel, the white skin. I feel that they have nothing to do with me.

I sit there for a while, then I get up and put the card in the paper-recycling bin, tucked under yesterday’s
Times
, where it can’t be seen.

I long for Richard to be here, but they won’t be back for hours; it’s only four o’clock — they’ll still be in the theater.
It’s the interval, perhaps; they’ll be talking politely and eating sugared popcorn. I want Richard to hold me. Suddenly I
hate the way we’ve let our love leak away through a hundred little cracks, like this morning, the irritation, the disagreements
over Calpol; and my fantasy about Fergal O’Connor embarrasses and shames me. Stupid to think such things, when I love and
need Richard so much. Without him I feel thin, etiolated, as though I have no substance. As though I’m a cardboard cutout,
a figure in that Nativity scene on the mantelpiece: intricately detailed, looking, in a dim light, almost solid, yet two-dimensional,
with no substance, nothing to weigh me down. Only Richard can hold me and make me real.

T
HE HOUSE HAS A FRESH JANUARY FEEL
, everything swept and gleaming. All the decorations, which sometime after Christmas lost their gloss, as though their sheen
had actually tarnished over, have been packed away in boxes in the attic. There are daffodils in a blue jug on the kitchen
table; they’re buds still, green but swelling. Tomorrow they will open, and already you can smell the pollen through the thin
green skin. And we have all made resolutions: Sinead to stop biting her nails, Richard to drink wine instead of whiskey, Daisy
to have a cat — though Sinead protested at this, as she felt it didn’t quite qualify as a resolution — and I have resolved
to take my painting more seriously. And to that end, today, the first day of term, I am going, all on my own, to an exhibition
that I read about in the paper, at the Tate Modern. It is called Insomnia and this is its final week. It is a series of sketches
by Louise Bourgeois, done in the night, fantastical — dandelion clocks, and tunnels made of hair, and a cat with a high-heeled
shoe in its mouth. And I shall buy a catalogue, like a proper artist, and be inspired, perhaps, and start to draw quite differently:
not just flowers but pictures from my mind.