‘She’s walking! Oh, thank God for that – can I stop playing Florence Nightingale now?’ Carolyn got up and kissed Eleanor on the cheek, which was uncomfortable for both of them. ‘Honestly, I wasn’t cut out for this. How are you feeling, darling?’
‘Much better, Mum. Still tired.’
‘Well, don’t be going home to those dreadful children of yours just yet. Let me make you a cup of tea.’
Eleanor sat down wearily at the fold-up kitchen table. She was wearing her mum’s old dressing gown, and the ratty towelling on her skin conjured up a memory so indistinct it was simply a feeling: her small face and body pressed into the fabric. They had never really had a family home – she barely remembered their house in Parsons Green, where she’d lived with her mum and dad until the divorce, and then it was flat after flat, circling the same patches of Hackney and Stoke Newington. And now they were in Carolyn’s ‘bachelor pad’ – the small flat she’d bought three years ago. But the furniture never changed; it shuttled around northeast London with them, and the chairs and the curtains and the fish slice contained her childhood. She looked at the kitchen scissors on the magnetic strip and she could feel her tiny hands clutching the great loop of orange plastic, the long silver swoop of the blade ahead.
When she’d first arrived at her mum’s flat, she’d been slipping in and out of sleep. She would wake up not knowing where she was, not knowing where Rosie and Isobel were, and she’d panic, before remembering. As she started to get better, the panic subsided and she felt more rational: to be apart from her children was less like a tragedy, more like something not quite right, askew. And as she got stronger, the moments she had to remind herself that she was on her own – that she could sit still, linger over breakfast, not rush in the shower – were accompanied by an acute pleasure. It was such a luxury to step outside your own life. Ordinarily, she didn’t think much about what things were like before she’d had children; it felt so far away, she sometimes thought she genuinely couldn’t remember it. Sitting at the table, watching her mum switch on the kettle, take down the Alton Towers mug, open the rusting tea tin, she started to reconnect with the person she used to be.
Carolyn had always told her she wished she’d never had children. Eleanor refused to take offence, partly because she knew Carolyn was trying to shock and she didn’t want to satisfy her. Carolyn said it destroyed your identity and your creativity, and she spoke fondly and evangelically about the imagined lives she might have had if she hadn’t met Eleanor’s father. She saw inadequate mothering as a mark of character.
Eleanor grew up thinking that Carolyn was vaguely demented and that she, Eleanor, would do a better job of being a woman. Part of that would be embracing motherhood. But now she had children, she found it was harder than she thought to do it well and there was no way to prove she was making a better job of it: there was too much doubt. It pleased her when the role seemed to fit, but inside, she knew she didn’t match up. When she had told Richard that Carolyn was ‘not like a mum’, she had known exactly what she meant by that; now she was less certain. She had been so sure of the ways Carolyn was deficient, but it was less easy to say what she ought to have done instead. She also couldn’t comprehend how Carolyn had brought up a child on her own, and even though she didn’t always think she had done it well, she was reluctantly in awe of it. She didn’t want to admire her mum – it was easier just to get annoyed with her – but sometimes it was unavoidable.
*
‘I’ve never seen you like that,’ Carolyn said, putting the mug of tea on the table. ‘As a child, you were so robust.’
Eleanor said nothing and took a sip of tea. Her jaw was still slightly strained from days of throwing up.
‘Where on earth do you think you picked it up from?’
Eleanor looked down. For a moment, she wondered if she could tell her. If she could say, It’s all the time. I’m ill all the time. I hate it, I can’t function, I can’t enjoy life and no one will listen to me. But it’s there every day and I’m scared it’s something in the house . . .
‘Is it those kids, do you think? The things you pick up from small children – they’re like vermin.’
Eleanor looked up again. ‘Yes, something from the nursery. I think that’s probably it.’
*
Recovery was sublime. She was tired but it was an exquisitely pleasurable tiredness because she could feed it. She lay on the sofa in her mum’s dressing gown, took naps. She remembered what sensation was like: iced water at the back of her throat, salted butter on her tongue. She became euphoric from it all: glorious showers and cups of tea and clean sheets. Her mum made her hearty comforting meals, which she wouldn’t eat herself, and Eleanor had never tasted anything so delicious.
The feeling was addictive; she became actively afraid of losing it. But she knew this wasn’t right – the flat was too small, Carolyn was getting on her nerves and she longed to be back with Isobel and Rosie. She wondered if the illness had been nothing to do with the house at all – maybe it was just a virus, lying low, that had now expressed itself fully and was gone. She had been run-down. Perhaps she could now finally begin to appreciate the house. Richard was right: it was an opportunity, a blank canvas. They could make whatever they wanted from it.
She felt brand new when Richard came to pick her up. She held Rosie and Isobel close to her and joy invaded her body so violently, she cried. For a few days, she was rejuvenated, bursting with energy. The small jobs that used to defeat her were now enjoyable – she gathered up the empty bottles in the bathroom, sticky with shampoo, mouthwash, hair wax, and washed them out and recycled them. She turned the bed covers back every morning and opened the window, to air the bed. She bought mothballs for the cupboards and made sweet potato mash for the freezer.
Then she grew tired again, but not the healing tiredness of the past few days – a different, more familiar kind. At first, she refused to accept it – it can’t be, I can’t, I can’t do this – but her cranium began to feel swollen, live, growing outwards. The nausea nagged at her insides. Her head became heavy and full and then there was the pain, thick and black, swelling and receding. Again, she would shut the front door behind her and sit on the steps outside her house or go to the nearest park and sink onto a damp bench, gasping. Eleanor was afraid. She was now certain: there was something in the house.