Martha had almost drifted into a sort of light sleep, but an image had come to her mind and woken her. The stand of elm trees in the garden where the children played. It flashed in her mind for only an instant. It wasn’t a disturbing image, she saw those trees every day, yet it had disturbed her. What came before it, what led to it, she couldn’t remember. The moon was up, and a pale light fell across the garden. She never slept well on a full moon. Perhaps it was just that. But she sensed a presence in the garden.
Something had stirred up her anxiety. She felt the uneasy feelings of the passing of time—for what she’d felt as soon as she’d seen the trees was the emptiness of them. Where was the little red swing? And where was the patch of dirt beneath it where no grass grew because of the children’s feet dragging over it? And the slats of wood that made a platform in the branches and all the mess that kids made: the discarded socks, the emptied plates, cups, hats, frisbees, tennis balls, PJ’s gnawed bones? None of these were there, just the dark figures of the branches sweeping up against the pale sky. The children had gone.
Was it Ada’s illness? Or was it Tilly? She didn’t want to think about Tilly. Martha had failed her. Is this what the empty trees meant? They looked so much like a memory. Had she dreamed herself forward in time so she could see the poignancy of now, the feeling that there was nothing she could hold forever, that even the trees—with their hundred-year-old trunks, their deep roots, their heights, their solidity—had been passed through, no longer to be climbed over, swung from, lain under, nested in.
Martha suddenly wanted to hold her children close. They were what pulled time forward: their bodies charging ahead, their discovering hands digging through, their voices shouting out, their startled eyes growing accustomed to it all. But she couldn’t hold them. Tilly was already gone from her and Ben was straining at the leash. It was really only Ada who still played in the elms. And when Ada stopped, children would be gone from Martha’s life. That would be the end of something vital and tender. There was nothing growing in her life anymore. Was Ada leaving her now? Was that the dream’s meaning? A family was nothing against the onslaught that life was. A family was too concentrated, too damp, too susceptible to rot.
She wriggled away from Mike in the bed and curled onto her side. He was sleeping well again. Martha had never known him not to sleep well, not until Joe’s death. Sometimes she suspected she had been attracted to Mike because his lack of emotion would balance her excess. She had been touched by his distress; it had even restored something of her feeling towards him. He wasn’t as mechanical or predictable as she had come to find him. It had been a strange surprise that Joe had meant that much to him. She had been relieved—this show of vulnerability was like a soft bruise that she could tend to. She had wanted to touch that softness, to feel it. And then he had rushed away.
If he were awake, she would make love to him. Suddenly it seemed important. And she would take the lead, draw in the sweetness, the density of love, and from it, replenish the brittle aspects of their togetherness.
But she was too tired, too glum, too raw. She rotated as if on a spit, from side to front to other side to back, each time thinking the next position would bring her sleep. Mike’s limbs, heavy with sleep, sought her out in the bed and then rested heavily on her. This irritated her—she couldn’t turn as she liked. No wonder she couldn’t sleep. No wonder those elm trees had made her sad. Life rushed through her, with a buffeting force, while Mike’s sleep-weighted body pinned her down. He wasn’t the only weight; it was other people’s opinions, expectations and convictions, and institutions and history and men and all that greatness with its hidden lies and the accumulation of dust on her floors. Even that.
And then there was the constant, unassailable claustrophobia of family. The airless juncture of the couple. They had flung their feelings at each other till they were battered; they had wrung the life out of the smallest coalescence of their emotion and lost any hope of magnificence.
The quiet, nagging grief of it all exhausted her. Soon she would be worn away, like those skeletons of leaves that you find at the end of autumn, half rotten in the wet ground. Joe Layton was in the ground, and Martha would die one day too. She would turn into a pale old lady with fluttering hands, the temerity in her blue blinking eyes faded into a slight bewilderment. One day she would be just a memory in her children’s lives. One day she would not even be that.