Desmond is a man who relies on the communicative powers of the handshake. Which renders my hand, a cluster of crushed bones, inert as he takes a step back and nods approvingly while still applying the pressure. He attempts what proves impossible in spite of my decision to cooperate. That is to stand back even further in order to inspect me more thoroughly without releasing my hand. The distance between us cannot be lengthened and I am about to point out this unalterable fact when his smile relaxes into speech.
‘Well what a surprise!’
‘Yes, what a surprise,’ I contribute.
It is of course no longer a surprise. I arranged the meeting two months ago when I wrote to Moira after years of silence between us, and yesterday I telephoned to confirm the visit. And I had met Desmond before, in fact at the same party at which Moira had been struck by the eloquence of his handshake. Then we discussed the role of the Student Representative Council, he, a final year Commerce student, confidently, his voice remaining even as he bent down to tie a shoe-lace. And while I floundered, lost in subordinate clauses, he excused himself with a hurried, ‘Back in a moment.’ We have not spoken since.
‘You’re looking wonderful, so youthful. Turning into something of a swan in your middle age hey!’
I had thought it prudent to arrange a one-night stay which would leave me the option of another if things went well. I am a guest in their house; I must not be rude. So I content myself with staring at his jaw where my eyes fortuitously alight on the tell-tale red of an incipient pimple. He releases my hand. He rubs index finger and thumb together, testing an imagined protuberance, and as he gestures me to sit down the left hand briefly brushes the jaw.
It always feels worse than it looks, he will comfort himself, feeling its enormity; say to himself, the tactual never corresponds with the appearance of such a blemish, and dismiss it. I shall allow my eyes at strategic moments to explore his face then settle to revive the gnathic discomfort.
Somewhere at the back of the house Moira’s voice has been rising and falling, flashing familiar stills from the past. Will she be as nervous as I am? A door clicks and a voice starts up again, closer, already addressing me, so that the figure develops slowly, fuzzily assumes form before she appears: ‘. . . to deal with these people and I just had to be rude and say my friend’s here, all the way from England, she’s waiting . . .’
Standing in the doorway, she shakes her head. ‘My God Frieda Shenton, you plaasjapie, is it really you?’
I grin. Will we embrace? Shake hands? My arm hangs foolishly. Then she puts her hands on my shoulders and says, ‘It’s all my fault. I’m hopeless at writing letters and we moved around so much and what with my hands full with children I lost touch with everyone. But I’ve thought of you, many a day have I thought of you.’
‘Oh nonsense,’ I say awkwardly. ‘I’m no good at writing letters either. We’ve both been very bad.’
Her laughter deals swiftly with the layer of dust on that old intimacy but our speech, like the short letters we exchanged, is awkward. We cannot tumble into the present while a decade gapes between us.
Sitting before her I realise what had bothered me yesterday on the telephone when she said, ‘Good heavens man I can’t believe it . . . Yes of course I’ve remembered . . . OK, let me pick you up at the station.’
Unease at what I now know to be the voice made me decline. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d like to walk, get to see the place. I can’t get enough of Cape Town,’ I gushed. For her voice is deeper, slowed down eerily like the distortion of a faulty record player. Some would say the voice of a woman speaking evenly, avoiding inflection.
‘I bet,’ she says, ‘you regretted having to walk all that way.’
She is right. The even-numbered houses on the left side of this interminable street are L-shaped with grey asbestos roofs. Their stoeps alternate green, red and black, making spurious claims to individuality. The macadamised street is very black and sticky under the soles, its concrete edge of raised pavement a virgin grey that invites you to scribble something rude, or just anything at all. For all its neat edges, the garden sand spills on to the pavement as if the earth were wriggling in discomfort. It is the pale porous sand of the Cape Flats pushed out over centuries by the Indian Ocean. It does not portend well for the cultivation of prizewinning dahlias.
I was so sure that it was Moira’s house. There it was, a black stoep inevitably after the green, the house inadequately fenced off so that the garden sand had been swept along the pavement in delicately waved watermark by the previous afternoon’s wind. A child’s bucket and spade had been left in the garden and on a mound of sand a jaunty strip of astroturf testified to the untameable. I knocked without checking the number again and felt foolish as the occupier with hands on her hips directed me to the fourth house along.
Moira’s is a house like all the others except for the determined effort in the garden. Young trees grow in bonsai uniformity, promising a dense hedge all around for those who are prepared to wait. The fence is efficient. The sand does not escape; it is held by the roots of a brave lawn visibly knitting beneath its coarse blades of grass. Number 288 is swathed in lace curtains. Even the glass-panelled front door has generously ruched lengths of lace between the wooden strips. Dense, so that you could not begin to guess at the outline approaching the door. It was Desmond.
‘Goodness me, ten, no twelve years haven’t done much to damage you,’ Moira says generously.
Think so Moi,’ Desmond adds. ‘I think Frieda has a contract with time. Look, she’s even developed a waistline,’ and his hands hover as if to describe the chimerical curve. There is the possibility that I may be doing him an injustice.
‘I suppose it’s marriage that’s done it for us. Very ageing, and of course the children don’t help,’ he says.
‘It’s not a week since I sewed up this cushion. What do the children do with them?’ Moira tugs at the loose threads then picks up another cushion to check the stitching.
‘See,’ Desmond persists, ‘a good figure in your youth is no guarantee against childbearing. There are veins and sagging breasts and of course some women get horribly fat; that is if they don’t grow thin and haggard.’ He looks sympathetically at Moira. Why does she not spit in his eye? I fix my eye on his jaw so that he says, ‘Count yourself lucky that you’ve missed the boat.’
Silence. And then we laugh. Under Desmond’s stern eye we lean back in simultaneous laughter that cleaves through the years to where we sat on our twin beds recounting the events of our nights out. Stomach-clutching laughter as we whispered our adventures and decoded for each other the words grunted by boys through the smoke of the braaivleis. Or the tears, the stifled sobs of bruised love, quietly, in order not to disturb her parents. She slept lightly, Moira’s mother, who said that a girl cannot keep the loss of her virginity a secret, that her very gait proclaims it to the world and especially to men who will expect favours from her.
When our laughter subsides Desmond gets a bottle of whisky from the cabinet of the same oppressively carved dark wood as the rest of the sitting-room suite.
‘Tell Susie to make some tea,’ he says.
‘It’s her afternoon off. Eh . . .’ Moira’s silence asserts itself as her own so that we wait and wait until she explains, ‘We have a servant. People don’t have servants in England, do they? Not ordinary people, I mean.’
‘It’s a matter of nomenclature I think. The middle classes have cleaning ladies, a Mrs Thing, usually quite a character, whom we pretend to be in awe of. She does for those of us who are too sensitive or too important or intelligent to clean up our own mess. We pay a decent wage, that is for a cleaner, of course, and not to be compared with our own salaries.’
Moira bends closely over a cushion, then looks up at me and I recall a photograph of her in an op-art mini-skirt, dangling very large black and white earrings from delicate lobes. The face is lifted quizzically at the photographer, almost in disbelief, and her cupped hand is caught in movement perhaps on the way to check the jaunty flick-ups. I cannot remember who took the photograph but at the bottom of the picture I recognise the intrusion of my right foot, a thick ankle growing out of an absurdly delicate high-heeled shoe.
I wish I could fill the ensuing silence with something conciliatory, no something that will erase what I have said, but my trapped thoughts blunder insect-like against a glazed window. I who in this strange house in a new Coloured suburb have just accused and criticised my hostess. She will have seen through the deception of the first-person usage; she will shrink from the self-righteousness of my words and lift her face quizzically at my contempt. I feel the dampness crawl along my hairline. But Moira looks at me serenely while Desmond frowns. Then she moves as if to rise.
‘Don’t bother with tea on my account,’ I say with my eye longingly on the whisky, and carry on in the same breath, ‘Are you still in touch with Martin? I wouldn’t mind seeing him after all these years.’
Moira’s admirers were plentiful and she generously shared with me the benefits of her beauty. At parties young men straightened their jackets and stepped over to ask me to dance. Their cool hands fell on my shoulders, bare and damp with sweat. I glided past the rows of girls waiting to be chosen. So they tested their charm – ‘Can I get you a lemonade? Shall we dance again?’ – on me the intermediary. In the airless room my limbs obeyed the inexorable sweep of the ballroom dances. But with the wilder Twist or Shake my broad shoulders buckled under a young man’s gaze and my feet grew leaden as I waited for the casual enquiry after Moira. Then we would sit out a dance chatting about Moira and the gardenia on my bosom meshed in maddening fragrance our common interest. My hand squeezed in gratitude with a quick goodnight, for there was no question about it: my friendship had to be secured in order to be considered by Moira. Then in the early hours, sitting cross-legged on her bed, we sifted his words and Moira unpinned for me the gardenia, crushed by his fervour, when his cool hand on my shoulder drew me closer, closer in that first held dance.
Young men in Sunday ties and borrowed cars agreed to take me with them on scenic drives along the foot of Table Mountain, or Chapman’s Peak where we looked down dizzily at the sea. And I tactfully wandered off licking at a jumbo ice-cream while they practised their kissing, Moira’s virginity unassailable. Below, the adult baboons scrambled over the sand dunes and smacked the bald bottoms of their young and the sunlicked waves beckoned at the mermaids on the rocks.
Desmond replies, ‘Martin’s fallen in love with an AZAPO woman, married her and stopped coming round. Shall we say that he finally lost interest in Moi?’
The whisky in his glass lurches amber as he rolls the stem between his fingers.
‘Would you like a Coke?’ he asks.
I decline but I long to violate the alcohol taboo for women. ‘A girl who drinks is nothing other than a prostitute,’ Father said. And there’s no such thing as just a little tot because girls get drunk instantly. Then they hitch up their skirts like the servant girls on their days off, caps scrunched into shopping bags, waving their Vaaljapie bottles defiantly. A nice girl’s reputation would shatter with a single mouthful of liquor.
‘The children are back from their party,’ Moira says. There is a shuffling outside and then they burst in blowing penny whistles and rattling their plastic spoils. Simultaneously they reel off the events of the party and correct each other’s versions while the youngest scrambles on to his mother’s lap. Moira listens, amused. She interrupts them, ‘Look who’s here. Say hallo to the auntie. Auntie Frieda’s come all the way from England to see you.’ They compose their stained faces and shake hands solemnly. Then the youngest bursts into tears and the other two discuss in undertones the legitimacy of his grievance.
‘He’s tired,’ Desmond offers from the depths of his whisky reverie, ‘probably eaten too much as well.’
This statement has a history, for Moira throws her head back and laughs and the little boy charges at his father and butts him in the stomach.
‘Freddie, we’ve got a visitor, behave yourself hey,’ the eldest admonishes.
I smile at her and get up to answer the persistent knock at the back door which the family seem not to hear. A man in overalls waiting on the doorstep looks at me bewildered but then says soberly, ‘For the Missus,’ and hands over a bunch of arum lilies which I stick in a pot by the sink. When I turn round Moira stands in the doorway watching me. She interrupts as I start explaining about the man.
‘Yes, I’ll put it in the children’s room.’
I want to say that the pot is not tall enough for the lilies but she takes them off hurriedly, the erect spadices dusting yellow on to the funnelled white leaves. Soon they will droop; I did not have a chance to put water in the pot.
I wait awkwardly in the kitchen and watch a woman walk past the window. No doubt there is a servant’s room at the far end of the garden. The man must be the gardener but from the window it is clear that there are no flowers in the garden except for a rampant morning glory that covers the fence. When Moira comes back she prepares grenadilla juice and soda with which we settle around the table. I think of alcohol and say, ‘It’s a nice kitchen.’ It is true that sunlight sifted through the lace curtains softens the electric blue of the melamine worksurfaces But after the formality of the sitting room the clutter of the kitchen comes as a surprise, the sink is grimy and harbours dishes of surely the previous day. The grooved steel band around the table top holds a neat line of grease and dust compound.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I like it. The living room is Desmond’s. He has no interest in the kitchen.’
And all the while she chops at the parsley, slowly chops it to a pulp. Then beneath the peelings and the spilled contents of brown paperbags she ferrets about until she drags out a comb.
‘Where the hell are the bay leaves?’ she laughs, and throws the comb across the worksurface. I rise to inspect a curious object on the windowsill from which the light bounces frantically. It is a baby’s shoe dipped into a molten alloy, an instant sculpture of brassy brown that records the first wayward steps of a new biped. I tease it in the sunlight, turning it this way and that.
‘Strange object,’ I say, ‘whose is it?’
‘Ridiculous hey,’ and we laugh in agreement. ‘Desmond’s idea,’ she explains, ‘but funnily enough I’m quite attached to that shoe now. It’s Carol’s, the eldest; you feel so proud of the things your child does. Obvious things, you know, like walking and talking you await anxiously as if they were man’s first steps on the moon and you’re so absurdly pleased at the child’s achievement. And so we ought to be, not proud I suppose, but grateful. I’m back at work, mornings only, at Manenberg, and you should see the township children. Things haven’t changed much, don’t you believe that.’
She picks up the shoe.
‘Carol’s right foot always leaned too far to the right and Desmond felt that that was the shoe to preserve. More character, he said. Ja,’ she sighs, ‘things were better in those early days. And anyway I didn’t mind his kak so much then. But I’d better get on otherwise dinner’ll be late.’
I lift the lace curtain and spread out the gathers to reveal a pattern of scallops with their sprays of stylised leaves. The flower man is walking in the shadow of the fence carrying a carrierbag full of books. He does not look at me holding up the nylon lace. I turn to Moira bent over a cheese grater, and with the sepia light of evening streaming in, her face lifts its sadness to me, the nutbrown skin, as if under a magnifying glass, singed translucent and taut across the high cheekbones.
‘Moira,’ I say, but at that moment she beats the tin grater against the bowl.
So I tug at things, peep, rummage through her kitchen, pick at this and that as if they were buttons to trigger off the mechanism of software that will gush out a neatly printed account of her life. I drop the curtain still held in my limp hand.
‘What happened to Michael?’ she asks.
‘Dunno. There was no point in keeping in touch, not after all that. And there is in any case no such thing as friendship with men.’ I surprise myself by adding, ‘Mind you, I think quite neutrally about him, even positively at times. The horror of Michael must’ve been absorbed by the subsequent horror of others. But I don’t, thank God, remember their names.’
Moira laughs. ‘You must be kinder to men. We have to get on with them.’
‘Yes,’ I retort, ‘but surely not behind their backs.’
‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘we were so blarry stupid and dishonest really. Obsessed with virginity, we imagined we weren’t messing about with sex. Suppose that’s what we thought sex was all about: breaking a membrane. I expect Michael was as stupid as you. Catholic, wasn’t he?’
I do not want to talk about Michael. I am much more curious about Desmond. How did he slip through the net? Desmond scorned the methods of her other suitors and refused to ingratiate himself with me. On her first date Moira came back with a headache, bristling with secrecy no doubt sworn beneath his parted lips. We did not laugh at the way he pontificated, his hands held gravely together as in prayer to prevent interruptions. Desmond left Cape Town at the end of that year and I had in the meantime met Michael.
There was the night on the bench under the loquat tree when we ate the tasteless little fruits and spat glossy pips over the fence. Moira’s fingers drummed the folder on her lap.
‘Here,’ she said in a strange voice, ‘are the letters. You should just read this, today’s.’
I tugged at the branch just above my head so that it rustled in the dark and overripe loquats fell plop to the ground.
‘No, not his letters, that wouldn’t be right,’ I said. And my memory skimmed the pages of Michael’s letters. Love, holy love that made the remembered words dance on that lined foolscap infused with his smell. I could not, would not, share the first man to love me.
‘Is he getting on OK in Durban?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I expect he still has many friends there. I’m going up just after the finals and then perhaps he’ll come back to Cape Town. Let’s see if we can spit two pips together and hit the fence at the same time.’
So we sat in the dark, between swotting sessions, under the tree with yellow loquats lustrous in the black leaves. Perhaps she mimicked his Durban voice, waiting for me to take up the routine of friendly mockery. I try in vain to summon it all. I cannot separate the tangled strands of conversation or remembered letters. Was it then, in my Durban accent, that I replied with Michael’s views about the permanence and sanctity of marriage?
‘Ja-ja-ja,’ Moira sighs, pulling out a chair. And turning again to check a pot on the stove, her neck is unbecomingly twisted, the sinews thrown into relief. How old we have grown since that night under the loquat tree, and I know that there is no point in enquiring after Desmond.
‘Do you like living here?’ I ask instead.
‘It’s OK, as good as anything.’
‘I was thinking of your parents’ home, the house where I stayed. How lovely it was. Everything’s so new here. Don’t you find it strange?’
‘Ag Frieda, but we’re so new, don’t we belong in estates like this? Coloureds haven’t been around for that long, perhaps that’s why we stray. Just think, in our teens we wanted to be white, now we want to be full-blooded Africans. We’ve never wanted to be ourselves and that’s why we stray . . . across the continent, across the oceans and even here, right into the Tricameral Parliament, playing into their hands. Actually,’ and she looks me straight in the eye, ‘it suits me very well to live here.’
Chastened by her reply I drum my fingertips on the table so that she says gently, ‘I don’t mean to accuse you. At the time I would have done exactly the same. There was little else to do. Still, it’s really nice to see you. I hope you’ll be able to stay tomorrow.’ Her hand bums for a moment on my shoulder.
It is time for dinner. Moira makes a perfunctory attempt at clearing the table, then, defeated by the chaos, she throws a cloth at me.
‘Oh God, I’ll never be ready by seven.’
I am drawn into the revolving circle of panic: washing down, screwing lids back on to jars, shutting doors on food that will rot long before discovery. Moira has always been hopeless in a kitchen so that there is really no point in my holding up the bag of potatoes enquiringly.
‘Oh stick it in there,’ and with her foot she deftly kicks open a dank cupboard where moisture tries in vain to escape from foul-smelling cloths. In here the potatoes will grow eyes and long pale etiolated limbs that will push open the creaking door next spring.
Her slow voice does not speed up with the frantic movements; instead, like a tape mangled in a machine, it trips and buzzes, dislocated from the darting sinewy body.
The children watch television. They do not want to eat, except for the youngest who rubs his distended tummy against the table. We stand in silence and listen to the child, ‘I’m hungry, really hungry. I could eat and eat.’ His black eyes glint with the success of subterfuge and in his pride he tugs at Moira’s skirt, ‘Can I sit on your knee?’ and offers as reward, ‘I’ll be hungry on your knee, I really will.’
Something explodes in my mouth when Desmond produces a bottle of wine, and I resolve not to look at his chin, not even once.
‘I’ve got something for you girls to celebrate with; you are staying in tonight, aren’t you? Frieda, I promise you this is the first Wednesday night in years that Moira’s been in. Nothing, not riots nor disease will keep her away from her Wednesday meetings. Now that women’s lib’s crept over the equator it would be most unbecoming of me to suspect my wife’s commitment to her black-culture group. A worthy affair, affiliated to the UDF you know.’ The wine which I drink too fast tingles in my toes and fingertips.
‘So how has feminism been received here?’ I ask.
‘Oh,’ he smiles, ‘you have to adapt in order to survive. No point in resisting for the sake of it, you have to move with the times . . . but there are some worrying half-baked ideas about . . . muddled women’s talk.’
‘Actually,’ Moira interjects, ‘our group has far more pressing matters to deal with.’
‘Like?’ he barks.
‘Like community issues, consciousness raising,’ but Desmond snorts and she changes direction. ‘Anyway, I doubt whether women’s oppression arises as an issue among whites. One of the functions of having servants is to obscure it.’
‘Hm,’ I say, and narrow my eyes thoughtfully, a stalling trick I’ve used with varying success. Then I look directly at Desmond so that he refills my glass and takes the opportunity to propose a toast to our reunion. This is hardly less embarrassing than the topic of servants. The wine on my tongue turns musty and mingles with the smell of incense, of weddings and christenings that his empty words resurrect.
Desmond is in a cooperative mood, intent on evoking the halcyon days of the sixties when students sat on the cafeteria steps soaking up the sun. Days of calm and stability, he sighs. He reels off the names of contemporaries. Faces struggle in formation through the fog of the past, rise and recede. Rita Jantjes detained under the Terrorism act. ‘The Jantjes of Lansdowne?’ I ask.
‘It’s ridiculous of them to keep Rita. She knows nothing; she’s far too emotional, an obvious security risk,’ Moira interjects.
‘No,’ Desmond explains, ‘not the Lansdowne Jantjes but the Port Elizabeth branch of the family. The eldest, Sammy, graduated in Science the year before me.’
I am unable to contribute anything else, but he is the perfect host. There are no silent moments. He explains his plans for the garden and defers to my knowledge of succulents. There will be an enormous rockery in the front with the widest possible variety of cacti. A pity, he says, that Moira has planted those horrible trees but he would take over responsibility for the garden, give her a bit more free time, perhaps I didn’t know that she has started working again?
Moira makes no effort to contribute to the conversation so diligently made. She murmurs to the little one on her knee whose fat fingers she prevents from exploring her nostrils. They giggle and shh-ssht each other, marking out their orbit of intimacy. Which makes it easier for me to conduct this conversation. Only once does he falter and rub his chin but I avert my eyes and he embarks smoothly on the topic of red wine. I am the perfect guest, a deferential listener. I do not have the faintest interest in the production of wine.
When we finish dinner Desmond gets up briskly. He returns to the living room and the children protest loudly as he switches off the television and puts on music. Something classical and rousing, as if he too is in need of revival.
‘Moi,’ he shouts above the trombones, ‘Moi, the children are tired, they must go to bed. Remember it’s school tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ she shouts back. Then quietly, Thursdays are always schooldays. But then Desmond isn’t always as sober as I’d like him to be.’
She lifts the sleeping child from her lap on to the bench. We rest our elbows on the table amongst the dirty dishes.
‘He gets his drink too cheaply; has shares in an hotel.’ Moira explains how the liquor business goes on expanding, how many professional people give up their jobs to become liquor moguls.
‘Why are the booze shops called hotels? Who stays in them? Surely there’s no call for hotels in a Coloured area?’
‘Search me, as we used to say. Nobody stays in them, I’m sure. I imagine they need euphemisms when they know that they grow rich out of other people’s misery. Cheap wine means everyone can drown his sorrows at the weekends, and people say that men go into teaching so that they have the afternoons to drink in as well. I swear the only sober man to be found on a Saturday afternoon is the liquor boss. The rest are dronkies, whether they loaf about on street corners in hanggat trousers or whether they slouch in upholstered chairs in front of television sets. And we all know a man of position is not a man unless he can guzzle a bottle or two of spirits. It’s not surprising that the Soweto kids of ’76 stormed the liquor stores and the shebeens. Not that I’d like to compare the shebeen queen making a miserable cent with the Coloured “elite” as they call themselves who build big houses and drive Mercedes and send their daughters to Europe to find husbands. And those who allow themselves to be bought by the government to sit in Parliament . . .’
She holds her head. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m optimistic and then it’s worth fighting, but other times, here in this house, everything seems pointless. Actually that wine’s given me a headache.’
I stare into the dirty plate so hard that surely my eyes will drop out and stare back at me. Like two fried eggs, sunnyside-up. Then I take her hand.
‘Listen, I know a trick that takes headaches away instantly.’ And I squeeze with my thumb and index finger deep into the webbed V formed by the thumb of her outstretched hand. ‘See? Give me the other hand. See how it lifts?’ Like a child she stares in wonderment at the hand still resting in mine.
The back door bursts open and Tillie rushes in balancing on her palm a curious object, a priapic confection.
‘Look,’ she shouts, ‘look, isn’t it lovely? It’s the stale loaf I put out for the birds and they’ve pecked it really pretty.’
The perfectly shaped phallus with the crust as pedestal has been sculpted by a bird’s beak. Delicately pecked so that the surface is as smooth as white bread cut with a finely serrated knife. We stare wanly at the child and her find, then we laugh. Tears run down Moira’s face as she laughs. When she recovers her voice is stern. ‘What are you doing outside at this hour? Don’t you know it’s ten o’clock? Where’s Carol?’
Carol bursts in shouting, ‘Do you know what? There are two African men in the playhouse, in our playhouse, and they’ve got our sleeping bags. Two grown-ups can’t sleep in there! And I went to tell Susie but she won’t open the door. She spoke to me through the window and she said it’s time to go to bed. But there’s other people in her room. I heard them. And Susie shouldn’t give people my sleeping bag.’
Moira waves her arm at Carol throughout this excited account, her finger across her lips in an attempt to quieten the child.
‘Ssht, ssht, for God’s sake, ssht,’ she hisses. ‘Now you are not to prowl around outside at night and you are not to interfere in Susie’s affairs. You know people have problems with passes and it’s silly to talk about such things. Daddy’ll be very cross if he knew that you’re still up and messing about outside. I suggest you say nothing to him, nothing at all, and creep to bed as quietly as you can.’
She takes the children by the hands and leads them out of the room. Moments later she returns to carry off the little one sleeping on the bench. I start to clear the table and when she joins me she smiles.
‘Aren’t children dreadful? They can’t be trusted an inch. I clean forgot about them, and they’ll do anything not to go to bed. When adults long to get to bed at a reasonable hour which is always earlier than we can manage . . . Of course sleep really becomes a precious commodity when you have children. Broken nights and all that. No,’ she laughs, looking me straight in the eye, ‘I can’t see you ever coping with children.’
The dishes are done. There is a semblance of order which clearly pleases Moira. She looks around the kitchen appreciatively then yawns. ‘We must go to bed. Go ahead, use the bathroom first. I’ll get the windows and doors shut. Sleep well.’
I have one of the children’s bedrooms. For a while I sit on the floor; the little painted chair will not accommodate me, grotesque in the Lilliputian world of the child. Gingerly I lay my clothes across the chair. It is not especially hot, but I open the window. For a while. I lie in my nightdress on the chaste little bed and try to read. The words dance and my eyes sting under heavy lids. But I wait. I stretch my eyes wide open and follow a mad moth circling the rabbit-shaped lamp by the side of the bed. I start to the mesmerising scent of crushed gardenia when the book slips and slips from under my fingers. In this diminutive world it does not fall with a thud. But I am awake once more. I wait.