NOW THAT HER mother is dead, Celia has all the time in the world. No more trips to the nursing home night after night, announcing her name to the security camera and waiting to be buzzed in. No more smells forcing her to strip and wash endlessly. No more anguish, doubts or guilt. From now on she’ll sleep undisturbed, eight hours of bliss, and rip each day from the next in one clean tear.
Celia glances at her watch. Ten to ten: the man will be here soon. She strides over to the lounge window and yanks aside the net curtains for a better view of the street. A cold February day, the sky sullen above the tall apartment block opposite. What’s left of the snow has frozen over again, forming a thin crust of white on gardens and rooftops. A red Fiat slows for some patches of black ice the salt lorries must have missed, then accelerates away down the side street. The ash tree out front is waving its soiled-looking branches at her.
Nothing doing, it seems to say, nothing at all.
She scowls in reply. Schildi, her neighbours’ tortoiseshell cat, is stalking through the snowdrops around the tree base, tail in the air, squinting up at the suspended wooden bird feeder where three sparrows and a robin are squabbling over their morning’s ration of sunflower seeds. With its snowy slanting roof and the arched openings on each side, the feeder reminds her of a miniature house – or an oddly peaked skull whose eye sockets are grey with snowlight. She stares at it. Until the tree is shaken by a squall that scatters ice crystals and twirls the feeder on its cord like a merry-go-round. Celia smiles to herself, then turns away from the window, curiously relieved.
But her cheek has grazed the bunched-up night curtains and the sensation makes her flinch. She’d always loathed those curtains; their texture’s too grainy, their colour too much like putrid skin. ‘Silver Sand’ was what they’d been marketed as in the catalogue, and her mother would stubbornly insist on the term.
Celia fancies she can hear her voice even now, a harsh whisper from the sofa which sets the air around her trembling:
Celia, please, it’s getting dark. If you didn’t mind drawing the silver sands?
The silence afterwards is interrupted by her own rapid breathing as she begins to raise a hand, then hesitates in mid-reach. Whatonearth is she doing? It’s light outside. And her mother is gone. GONE. Sealed inside that box of polished wood and brass and satin, two metres underground. No need to obey her requests and demands any longer.
Moments later, though, Celia lunges out with both arms. ‘Yes, I know what I’m doing!’ she cries and pounces on the curtain folds, grabbing fiercely. The cloth gives with a shriek. There’s no stopping her now; she wrenches off the metal hoops with the last few putrid-coloured tatters. The net curtains are child’s play by comparison; their weak plastic rings break like a sudden wave and she collapses in a heap of fabric and dust, laughing herself into a sneezing fit. One clean tear, she thinks. A start of sorts.
No voice had tried to restrain her. No one. Dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her aquamarine silk blouse, Celia glances at her watch again: three minutes to ten. Better get rid of this mess before the man appears.
Time, of course, isn’t the only thing she has in abundance now.
There’s the money, too.
And space. Perhaps that most of all. With her mother’s death, space had exploded around her, expanding indefinitely until she could hardly see the corners of the room she happened to be in, as if the sharp winter sunlight had obliterated them, abandoning her in the vastness of a desert.
Eventually, a good week after the funeral, she’d rung up a decorator.
‘You won’t believe your luck,’ exclaimed the woman who’d answered the phone, ‘someone’s just cancelled a contract job.’ The men could start pretty much immediately, she said, and would it suit if Herr Lehmann called round, now let me see, on Tuesday?
No, Celia didn’t believe the woman’s spiel, not one word of it. But, yes, Tuesday did suit.
Seven minutes past ten: Lehmann’s late. Celia stands on tiptoe and stretches hard, her fingernails scrabbling at the metal of the empty curtain rail ineffectually. For an instant she feels like a small girl again, trying to prove she’d grown up so her mother would be happier with her, the way she used to be with adults, and Walter – until he left home. Celia groans, caught up in emotions she’d thought were buried as deeply as contaminated waste. Her body sags against the window sill. Outside everything is hushed: not a single car in sight, the branches of the ash tree frozen into stillness, Schildi and the birds scared off. Even the apartment block and the half-timber farmhouse next to it, behind the fenced-in rows of vegetable beds, seem to have sunk into hibernation.
Several seconds pass before Celia rallies herself – forgodsake, woman, you’re nearing forty! She tugs open the window and leans out, willing the man to materialise. She hopes his van will be emblazoned, ‘Painters & Decorators’ splurged in large rainbow letters all over its sides to let the whole neighbourhood know that she, Celia Roth, is beginning a new life.
This is the first time she has made a decision that’s bound to leave a mark. To change things. Things as opposed to ideas. Things are visible; ideas and opinions can be hidden away. At last she’ll be able to mar those pastel walls – those fleshy pinks and creams, those flaccid greens. New paint will stick and so will the paste under new wallpaper. Even steaming won’t ever return the place to its previous state of unholy insipidness. Something will remain. And that something will be hers, and hers alone.
All at once Celia notices how naked the window has become without the curtains, like an enormous peephole inviting others to pry – strangers, neighbours; Rolf and Carmen from upstairs, old Frau Müller in the farmhouse, the shabby tenants of the apartment block. You’ve got nothing to hide, she reassures herself, nothing to fear. And anyway, there are the outside shutters. They clank closed easily enough.
‘But don’t say later I didn’t warn you, Frau Roth.’ The decorator is dressed casually in shirt sleeves, no jacket, and sounds a little petulant.
Celia smiles at him – words of caution no longer have power over her. Instead of smiling back, he regards her with a mixture of distrust and tired belligerence. Since he set foot in the flat his professional pride has been hurt over and over – a room at a time, as it were. He swallows another Kambly caprice biscuit, washes it down with his coffee, then slicks a blond-bleached curl behind his ear.
‘More?’ Celia asks. She has snatched up the coffee pot and the liquid can be heard sloshing about inside. She feels suddenly uneasy, wonders whether she is trying to placate Lehmann after rejecting his suggestions earlier so gracelessly. Or whether she’s simply pandering to his good looks. He is in his mid-forties, she’d guess: a man in his prime. With thick curly hair almost down to his shoulders, the way she remembers Walter’s before he had to get it cut off for the Rekrutenschule, his compulsory five-month stint in the army; and a freckly round face like a boy’s, confused a little by the thin nose, sharp teeth and Vandyke beard of the grown-up. His eyes are unwavering – pin-prick pupils in a softness of blue – and they unsettle her. He is wearing a wedding ring. Celia is holding the pot slightly tilted above his cup, ready to pour. ‘More?’ she repeats, feeling increasingly exasperated, and guilty. ‘Or have you had enough?’
His eyebrows, lashes and the Vandyke are black, his natural colour presumably. Just like that hearse-style van he’d arrived in, quarter of an hour late – jet black and waxed to a gleam, with the firm’s name curlicued discreetly, far too discreetly, in gold on both doors.
‘No, that’ll do. Thanks.’ Alex realises his hand has covered the coffee cup as if the woman had proposed strychnine. Of course he isn’t afraid of her. She’s a bit screwed up, that’s all. Kind of sleek and wide-eyed, unnerving with that wet-gel straight hair right over her breasts which swell so unashamedly against the water green of her blouse. Like he used to imagine mermaids when he was a kid. But Christ, what a nightmare of a colour scheme for her flat! It’s always the same story: first the I-know-what-I-want rashness of choice, then – with the wallpaper still blistered and the paint not yet dry – the stunned silence, finally the murmurs of regret, shrill complaints and acts of sabotage (usually involving some phantom pet that just happens to be moulting).
Not to worry though. The woman’s old enough. And once she’s put her name on the dotted line, well, what the heck … He starts gathering his brochures and sample files while Celia reaches for the order form on the coffee table, signs and dates it, her face glazed with obstinacy. Having fetched a bundle of notes from the rosewood bureau in the corner, she relaxes at last. She smiles to herself, aware of his gaze travelling up and down her front, and counts out the money.
‘I’ll pay five hundred francs now if that’s okay,’ she says. ‘The rest on completion of each room.’
‘Fine by me.’ Alex is careful not to shake his head as he detaches the Client’s Copy from the form. Her signature is an almost-scrawl: Celia Roth – psychedelia, more like! He throws the electronic measuring tape into his briefcase, on top of the files, and snaps the locks extra hard.
Celia has stood up. It’s twenty past twelve. For a moment she pictures his wife, probably, petite and pretty in a tight-fitting apple-green apron, waiting for him. Maybe she has already laid out their lunch on the table, the steam condensing greasily on pan and porcelain lids. Maybe he’s even got children. Boys, girls, babies. No doubt he would. And they’ll be clamouring for their food. So hungry. Always hungry, always clamouring.
Suppressing a shiver, Celia points to where a small metal tape-measure sits like a snail under the rim of his saucer: ‘And don’t forget that.’
‘Oh, thanks.’ He smiles. For the first time he seems gratified, not in a hurry any more. He clicks the briefcase open, then shut again with a gentle roll of his thumbs, saying, ‘I’ve got a longer tape in my jacket pocket, you know. Much bigger. Only I lost a button on that jacket and there’s no spare. So now all the buttons need changed. But my wife …’
After an apologetic cough and a dismissive gesture which erases any lingering impressions of petite apple-green aprons from Celia’s mind, Lehmann strokes his Vandyke, raising mournful black eyebrows.
This would be the perfect opportunity to offer womanly help and understanding, but Celia can’t quite believe him. He sounds too glib, relies too much on his looks: the male of the species strutting his stuff. And if this wasn’t enough, she absolutely hates sewing. Sewing of any kind – buttons, splits, relationships.
Alex gives her five seconds to express a little sympathy. Then, when she doesn’t, he slaps the biscuit crumbs off his trousers. What else did you expect? he admonishes himself, irritated at his feelings of disappointment. A job’s a job, and that’s that.
Getting up he casts an eye round the lounge, pausing for a moment on the unscreened window. A bit risky, he’d have thought, with that big apartment building right opposite. Or does she like the idea of being on show perhaps? None of his business, at any rate. A week from now the room they’re in will be purple, various shades of purple, to be precise. The woman made sure of that, flicked back her long hair challengingly every time he tried to object. Lighter tones for walls and ceiling; the centre rosette, cornice, skirting, window frame, door and fireplace surrounds a nuance darker; the radiators and door darker still, with the inside panels near black – like madly diminishing perspectives into a private hell.
It’s the middle of the night and Celia is awake. She forgot to pull the curtains and now the moonlight is all over her. It’s soaked into the bedding on top of her, underneath her, soaked into the folds around her head and feet, along her sides, making the sheets cold-heavy.
She can’t move, not even her little finger, just lies there and stares out at the huge frosty disc which has forced itself on her and stolen her sleep. Not a face, certainly not a friendly one, whatever people might say. She can’t think clearly because every so often the disc becomes a gigantic white eyehole that’s trying to suck her into its brightness.
After a while she begins to feel dizzy. She still can’t move but seems to have shrunk and is being turned roundandroundandround within those hardened sheets. To steady herself she concentrates on the cloud shadows floating across the disc. Then sees them dissolve very slowly into a ring of refracted light. A gigantic iris – orange, red, violet, indigo, blue, green and yellow – to go with the eyehole that’s started sucking again. Sucking, sucking her inside …
Inside the eyehole is her brother raging like a red-ragged bull. And everything is happening all over again.
‘Mother’s flat is yours now?’ Walter keeps roaring, ‘Yours alone?’
No point in reminding him of the mortgage which she herself will have to take on. Or his share of the money (the legal minimum, admittedly) and the trusts set up for his boys – he is beyond listening.
And beyond himself, it seems. ‘Yours alone? What a bitch! I did whatever she wanted, didn’t I? Didn’t I?’ Definitely beyond himself. ‘Bloody BITCH!’
Their mother’s last will isn’t her fault, is it? Walter is the one that went away – first, at barely sixteen, to the other side of town for his apprenticeship, finally, having married Lily on her twentieth birthday, to the other side of the globe, to New Zealand.
She is the one to ‘have it all’ as he puts it. Hasn’t she just! Does he really think she enjoyed nursing Mother while working full time? Enjoyed the fuzziness at the edges of days when afternoon would blur into evening, evening into night into midnight then early morning, with those cups of milky coffee, bowls of soup and hot-water bottles dripping and seeping into the few remaining gaps in between? Later the visits at the home, the spongy cancerous growths and bloodstained handkerchiefs, the odours needing smothered in lavender – their mother had been a beautician, forgodsake, could he imagine how she’d reacted to the sight and smell of her own decay? Does he honestly believe she, Celia, enjoyed having to witness all that? All that pain and despair, she adds to herself, without once being allowed to feel the intimacy that must exist, surely, between a mother and a daughter?
She’d phoned Walter as soon as she could after dealing with the most urgent formalities, so he would be able to book a flight before she finalised the funeral arrangements. And five minutes into the call he’d asked about the will. How could she pretend not to know? In the end he sent a wreath. Yellow carnations. Gaudily disdainful, the flowers spoke louder than words, and none of the family flew over. Not even sister-in-law Lily, who used to be her best friend.
When Celia wakes in the morning, her left hand is clenched into a fist. Her knuckles are sore and bone white. She sits up, massages the fingers back into place, joint by joint. Her hand is empty. That something she’d been clasping was less than nothing, she tells herself. A bead of sweat perhaps, dried long since, or a dream she can’t remember.