CELIA HAD NEVER seen black flowers before, not real ones, that is. Black diamonds, yes – though she’d been shocked at their unexpectedly metallic lustre. Gemstones in most varieties she is accustomed to: they come with her job at Eric Krüger’s. But not flowers.
She leans back against her pillow and breathes in deeply, rhythmically. In and out. In – out. Already the smell is creeping up on her. In – out. The raw sappy smell of tulips.
Black tulips. A big bouquet of them, tied together with a ruby-red ribbon, had been delivered to the chapel of rest on the day of her mother’s funeral – no card, no name, no nothing.
It seemed perfectly natural to want to take one of them home with her.
Before the coffin was removed into the main hall for the funeral service, she’d walked round it one more time, trying to avoid the stern hollow face which seemed to balance on the plastic chin-support like yet another flower head wired into its wreath. She’d bent down ever so slightly to reach for the tulips in the vase at its foot.
Nobody could have noticed how she nipped off a single stalk, then opened her handbag, to all appearances for a paper tissue. It was done in a second and there weren’t many people about. Except for some distant relatives, only Uncle Godfrey, big and bent double over his crutches as he stood mourning his sister, and Margaret, her red-gold hair flat and lifeless under the black lace scarf, as if the death of her best friend had drained away all brilliancy. After quickly wiping her eyes with the tissue, it was easy to rub the sap’s clotted slitheriness off her fingers unobtrusively. The ungodly thoughts had come later as she leafed through her hymn book during the service and caught a lingering whiff of that zingy smell.
Celia scrambles off her floor-level bed, determined not to give in to those thoughts now. She sees herself returning from the funeral reception at the Schlosshotel and, scarcely in. her own front door, bringing the tulip out for a closer look. But instead of simply looking she’d twitched off a petal, and her heart had jumped with spiteful delight. Every day over the next week she’d done the same – a petal a day keeps Mother away. Till delight turned to disenchantment.
Whatonearth had she hoped to find, apart from observing the progressive states of desiccation? The last two petals were almost transparent and when she held them up to the light, they muted the brightness around her like a thin dark veil.
Once those petals had gone, though, there was nothing to hold things at bay. Walter’s angry rejection of their mother began to haunt her, charging the very atmosphere of the house. On several occasions in the past week she’d been unable to stop herself from entering his former bedroom (used as a store room since his departure, musty and crowded with junk-filled solid oak cabinets and cupboards from their grandfather’s antiques shop) to check he wasn’t lurking among the furniture. Even out in the garden – feeding the birds, coaxing Schildi away from the ash tree, or idling by the letter box to breathe in the delicate scent of the winter jasmine she’d trained around the gatepost – she had sensed a strange vicious iciness in the wind. And doing her shopping at the Co-op up the street, she would suddenly hesitate in front of the fresh-meat counter where she’d intended to treat herself to a veal escalope or an ostrich steak from one of the local producers, as she smelt not the chilled cleanliness, but dead flesh.
Breakfast is a rushed affair today because Celia wants to get the clearing well under way before Lehmann and his assistant drop off their tools and tins of paint in the afternoon. Thankgod the house will feel different soon, liberated from ghosts and spirits. She has put on her oldest clothes, the pair of dove-grey flares and the eau-de-nil turtleneck (both presents from her mother, bought by mail order as a surprise years ago and only ever worn if she’d been reminded).
Passing along the corridor Celia pictures the walls in crimson. That’s the colour she’d selected yesterday, quite instinctively and without meaning to offend Lehmann, who’d ended up making an impassioned plea for ‘gentle gardenia’ and ‘the illusion of spaciousness’. Crimson, after all, is more than a mere colour to her, it’s an emotion. It’s the flush of anger on her mother’s cheeks whenever she’d suspected her of loitering after business hours at Krüger’s, going for a drive maybe or a visit to the cinema rather than keeping her company. Homecoming is crimson for Celia, and always will be.
She pushes open the door to the lounge. Gasps. Recoils. And sinks to her knees. For the briefest of instants she’d glimpsed a figure draped on the sofa, extending an arm towards her.
What would they say at work if they could see her now, so small and helpless, crouching on the floor? She who considers herself the best secretary old Eric has ever had, fearless and brisk behind her bullet-proof office partition? But no doubt they’re too busy to spare her more than a tolerant smile – well, well, so poor dear Celia is human like the rest of us – Angelina getting the gemstones on her desk all mixed up again while flaunting her apprentice charms at Handsome Henry, the courier; and Eric, ensconced in his king-size swivel chair in the inner office, dreaming up yet another sales ploy to compensate for the ‘January hole’. Only fat little Lapis, Eric’s blue-roan spaniel, would be happy to pay her his respects: he’d throw himself on his back, legs in the air, right next to her. Lapis the Fat. And the Faithful.
When Celia dares look over to the sofa again, the figure has vanished. There’s nothing but a mound of cushions in its place.
Celia’s face feels gritty; her contact lenses itch and bite. She peels off her mother’s beige church gloves, soiled now beyond redemption, and lifts back her long hair. She wouldn’t have believed that a carpet kept so scrupulously clean, vacuumed at least twice a week, could produce such a flurry of dust and fluff. The room seems to be swirling with it, to have grown darker, more distinct, as if its ceiling, walls and corners had hauled in the space between them, compressing it, like a snow cloud closing in on a winter’s day.
She has ripped up a good two-thirds by now, pulling out the carpet staples with a claw hammer. One of them, near the fireplace, stuck so fast she’d lost her balance and staggered back against the sofa; the hammer had missed her thankgod, and instead gouged a hole in her mother’s favourite silk cushion. Another of her selfish whims, Celia muses, staring down at the floor: a white carpet (white carpet Mark 3) in a room with an open fire – coal at first, then, following the new regulations on fuel emissions, logs. Getting the lounge radiators installed when she moved back in with her mother five and a half years ago had almost caused a fight.
The original carpet had been fitted shortly after Celia’s father disappeared ‘in search of a better world’, as his sudden absence had been explained. The phrase had lodged in her mind like a precious stone. A little girl of hardly more than six, she used to fantasise about him and the Seven Dwarfs mining for gold and diamonds far, far away beyond the Alps; and ever since, she has been drawn to gemstones. Now that she’s been told about the flash flood and can cope with abstracts and ambiguities, she asks herself at times: Once you’ve lost it, whatever it is, how do you know where to start looking?
That carpet. She’ll never forget the day of her first real date and how nervous she was, so nervous a big lump of coal fell off the scuttle and bounced a smudge trail across its whiteness, as if to mock her tidily laid-out newspapers. She’d done her best to conceal the marks temporarily – it was an emergency, after all – regrouping the armchairs, the coffee table and the standard lamp, scattering a few school books on the floor, spine up, as if for future reference. Then, dressed in her hot-pink trouser suit with lipstick and eye shadow to match, her hair combed one last time in front of the mirror in the corridor, she was just reaching for the spare set of keys on their hook when –
‘Oh, before you’re off to meet your friend, Celia dear: I noticed a small mishap in the lounge …’ Smiling her cleanest most efficient smile, her mother held out a basin of soapy water, a toothbrush and several sheets of blotting paper, pale-blue blotting paper.
‘I’m really sorry, Mother. I’ll sort it when I get back. Promise.’
‘This isn’t a coalmine, Celia.’
‘Honest, I promise.’
‘Which only leaves me then, doesn’t it?’
She’d been three-quarters of an hour late and her would-be lover long gone. Still she lingered outside the café in the bitter cold, stood waiting and hoping, and thinking of how Walter had taken Lily’s affections away from her two years earlier – until she felt the mascara trickle down her cheeks.
She’s hated that bland soggy blotting-paper blue to this day. She never walks to the office if the sky is that colour: she either drives or gets the bus, and welcomes dusk like a caged bird might the spread of a dark cloth.
Celia squeezes her mother’s gloves back on, rumbles the furniture over on to the floorboards, into the centre of the room, and sets to tearing up the rest of the carpet, kicking and rolling it into a slumped kind of shape. Even Margaret, who tended to agree with her mother in most things and had a weakness for elegance and beauty, used to call that carpet a liability. It’s too heavy to shift, a leaden weight with none of its former springiness left. She’ll be glad to see it carried out of the house to be burnt or left to rot. Never mind the cost.
Everything in this country has its price, rubbish not least. ‘A tag a bag’ is the town council’s slogan and, at two francs fifty a tag, people have learnt to recycle fast.
The floorboards and the dirt gaps running straight and black in between seem to give the lounge direction at last. As if the entire room was free to move now and might, indeed, at any moment incline slightly towards the ash tree with its host of hungry chattering birds, or retreat through the Beauty Room and kitchen into the peace and quiet of the frost-wizened backyard.
‘That should come off easily enough.’ It’s late afternoon and Lehmann has slid his knife sideways under the champagne wallpaper next to the door surround. ‘See?’ He half-turns to Celia, shakes out his blond-bleached locks to get her attention. Then he plucks off a strip, revealing a sea-green mural underneath, complete with whorls of blue, yellow and red like tropical fish. He brandishes it but Celia is no longer interested. She has stepped up to the wall and started tracing the different colours with her fingernail, up, down, left, right, roundandroundandround.
She imagines the roundabout a few blocks away, beyond the Co-op. She loves driving round it with the steering wheel at near-full lock, loves the sensation of ease and security, particularly after fiddling with tiny gemstones for hours on end, weighing and reweighing them. She’d managed a record seventeen circuits, traffic and all, the day her mother died. If it hadn’t been for the strain to her eyes and an unaccountable numbness creeping up her legs, she might have gone on forever.
Dominic, Lehmann’s assistant, brushes past with a ladder and some dustsheets, his paint-spattered baseball cap back to front. The woman doesn’t seem to have noticed him, and for a moment he watches her finger drawing circles on the bare patch of wall, his eyes hooded from years of guarding against splashes of paint, loose flakes of plaster and wallpaper, and single ladies who want their immaculate flats shredded then re-padded for no better reason than to keep themselves entertained. With a shrewd well-rehearsed glance-and-grin towards his boss he says:
‘That green colour’s nothing out of the ordinary, Frau Roth, just ancient paint. You’d be surprised at some of the other things we’ve found under wallpaper. Isn’t that so, Alex?’ He forces open his lids, raises his voice a notch, ‘Like that time over at the rectory, remember?’
Her hand doesn’t stop, never even slows down. She reminds him of the black cat he had as a boy and how it used to sit behind the closed door, pawing and pawing to be let in.
Alex has crossed to the fireplace, knife in fist, and stabbed the wall high up, slicing off another strip, expertly, right down to the skirting. He has decided to play along for a bit, not really to humour his assistant nor to tease the Roth woman either – he’s not the teasing sort – but because she annoys him, plain and simple. Annoys him standing there, ignoring them like they’re a couple of dummies. He looks over his shoulder and remarks loudly:
‘No skeletons here, Dominic.’
Dominic laughs.
Of course Celia is aware of being watched and ridiculed, only she couldn’t care less. These days she can do what she wants, can’t she? She’s no longer the kid condemned to write dictation on the blackboard, with her classmates snickering at every mistake. She can turn round and snicker back. Or she can stay where she is, and if she feels like stroking the wall she’ll damn well do it. The surface has a waxy sheen that makes her think of skin …
Such tasteless jokes, though. What do they know about skeletons? Ghosts? About the bones of mice and rats, the shrivelled-up bodies of spiders, beetles, slowworms? That was one of Walter’s specialities when he wanted to give her a fright. ‘Guess what I’ve discovered by the garden wall, sis?’ he’d ask. The first few times she was naive enough to expect a magic frog that would transform itself into her prince, or at the very least a lizard sunning itself on a stone and, if touched before it could flit off into a crevice, obligingly surrendering its tail.
Celia whips round abruptly. The two men, she notices with a certain Frauenpower relish, scurry into action at once, flapping their grubby off-white dustsheets over the armchairs, sofa, coffee table, standard lamp, bureau and bookcases assembled under the ceiling rosette, stacking rolls of paper, tools and tins into neatly useless pyramids.
That done, the decorator smooths and pats his curls, then jerks a thumb at the hump of carpet along the wall opposite the window: ‘You’re better leaving the carpets until the job’s done, lady, or the paint’ll mess up your nice clean floorboards.’ He throws down some dustsheets.
The assistant stares over at her, pushes back his baseball cap and, still staring, mops his brow and drooping eyelids with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
Celia turns away; how she hates amateur dramatics! Why can’t they go now? It’s quarter to five and they promised not to keep her late.
Suddenly a flash of metal catches her eye.
‘Excuse me,’ she says and stoops to pick up the stripping knife. Its hard rubber grip is faintly warm from Lehmann’s hand. ‘May I borrow this for a while?’
She’d laughed out loud at the men’s sheepish scandalised looks. At the threat-and-concern in Lehmann’s voice as he wished her ‘a pleasant evening’ from the street door half a flight below, his Vandyke thrust up at her. Afterwards, like a good girl, she’d laid the knife back down because she didn’t really need it, did she?
Celia leans her head against the coolness of the open lounge door. Her eyes have started to water, she’s laughed so much.
‘You don’t blink enough, that’s what’s wrong with you,’ the optician had told her the previous week, cutting short her descriptions of the bleary featurelessness she’d begun to experience in the flat. He’d wiped his hands on his white lab coat, then noted something down on a filing card, muttering to himself. A sad man he must be to want people to blink all the time, she’d reflected, and smiled to cheer him up. In response he’d taken hold of her head, squirted some fluid out of a bottle straight into her eyes:
‘Come on, Frau Roth. Blink!’ And again, his voice split with impatience: ‘Blink! I said. BLINK! BLINK!’
And now, all by herself, Celia is blinking and blinking, and it doesn’t help. Not one bit.
The room’s a liquidy blur and already the walls are receding. The dustsheets are looming larger and brighter, with an unbearable tint of blue leaking from their folds, as if they had absorbed too much daylight.
Celia wants to shut the door and walk away, but there’s that cold-heavy weight again all around her, like last night. Blink by blink the clutter of furniture beneath the dustsheets changes shape, its jagged outlines slacken, level out, merge into one single mass, more and more familiar. And although she knows this is impossible, she can see it just the same, right in front of her: that oblong object, shrouded.
Celia blinks and blinks.
If she blinks long enough, the room will settle down – she’s got all night.
If she blinks long enough, the furniture won’t pretend to be anything but furniture, and she’ll be fine.
She’s got all the time in the world.
She blinks and blinks, waiting for the rustle as the sky’s turned inside out.