He was standing beside the door, framed against the dawn. She watched what he was watching: the broad, heavy-bellied sky, the fierce flames of light at the horizon, which would shortly rise, leaching their colours into the clear, pure light of day.
‘Here,’ Della said, and Robert turned, took the mug. Black, double shot, a teaspoon of sugar. He was pale-skinned in his pyjamas, his navy towelling dressing gown with its loosening threads at the sleeve. His hair still thick, but now entirely grey.
They both woke early these days, Della naturally – she’d always been an early riser, didn’t seem to need as much sleep as most people – and Robert out of necessity. He’d used to sleep so deeply – sometimes, at weekends, right into the middle of the morning, making up for his week of early commutes – but his sleep was fitful now; she often heard him moving around in the night. Sometimes, when she rose at six, Della found him in the living room, snoring, his head thrown back against the sofa, his neck painfully cricked; he’d be rubbing it later, hunting for ibuprofen.
Robert sipped his coffee and said, ‘I’m worried about Lizzy.’
Della nodded. She pressed the button on the machine and it whirred and spluttered. ‘I am too.’
‘She just seems so … Lost. Unmoored.’
‘She does. We all have been, I suppose, but Lizzy … of course it was going to hit her hard. But I thought she’d have sold the cottage by now. I think Christine would have wanted her to sell it and move on. Live her own life. She knows we’d take the dogs.’
Della sat; Robert remained standing. The day was coming on, shafts of greyish light slanting in through the broad expanses of glass. It had been open to the elements, this portion of the house, when they’d first bought the oast: a kind of covered terrace or veranda where the grain had once been unloaded; there were two square kilns where the hops had been heated and dried and a central, rectangular section their surveyor had called the ‘granary’. Robert had taken a deep professional interest in all this, admiring the workmanship, the small feats of Victorian industrial engineering. But Della knew he was pained by the house’s slow decay – there had been historic movement, the roofline of the granary sagged, there were cracks inside and out. The kitchen conversion had been Robert’s idea: knocking through walls, remodelling the space, sealing in the veranda with glass.
‘And she won’t come on Christmas Eve? Spend the evening with us, wake up here?’
Della shook her head. ‘She says she’ll drive over in the morning.’
‘Shame.’
Robert sat, frowning. She knew he was thinking about Christmas, which mattered to him far more than it ever had to her. His father Abe was the same, had embraced the pseudo-Christian festival with all the fervour of a new convert. Robert’s grandparents had always kept Hanukah, and never quite forgiven Abe for marrying Robert’s mother Katherine, a Catholic, lapsed as she was; though Katherine had brought the menorah out each year. They had it now, had rescued it from among the vanloads of stuff Robert and Fran had disposed of when Abe went into The Oaks; it was upstairs in the living room, offering the comfort of its candles each night to the sheep in the neighbouring field.
‘It’s not the same without her, is it?’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose it will ever be.’
Christine, he meant, of course; they had spent almost every Christmas together, the four of them – give or take the odd set of parents, relatives, waifs and strays – since the mid-1980s, for almost as long as Della and Robert had been together. Thirty-six years: an extraordinary length of time, though Della and Christine had known each other longer. Forty-one years they’d been friends, when Christine died. The previous year, they’d bought each other silver bracelets, threaded with red semi-precious stones; their friendship, they’d decided, deserved just as much celebration as any marriage, especially, Christine had joked, as neither of them had ever actually been a bride.
Della was still wearing her bracelet now – she never took it off, not even in the shower. She looked down at it, fine and delicate on her right wrist. She wondered where Christine’s had gone, whether Lizzy had it now. She’d never seen Lizzy wearing it, but perhaps she’d consider that strange.
‘No,’ Della said. ‘It won’t be. Nothing will.’
Della was working on a piece for Robert: a Christmas present, though it wouldn’t be ready for some weeks. She’d wanted to have it done sooner, unveil it on Christmas Day, remove the protective sheet with a magician’s flourish (Della had an appetite for such moments of drama), but she’d struggled more than she’d expected with the clay maquettes, and now the foundry was closed until the new year.
They’d sent back the wax casting, anyway; she had it here in the studio, under a cloth veil. Robert had been issued with strict instructions not to enter without warning. She planned to bring him out here on Christmas morning, to at least show him this, her waxen prototype – though of course the sculpture looked nothing like it would when it was cast in bronze and set in the garden, tall and broad and solid, with a circular portion missing from the middle, like a window, a porthole, admitting the grass and sky beyond. She was retaining the missing portion, also casting it, and planning to set it a few feet away, on the ground, as if a section of the larger piece had simply wrested itself free and rolled off. In her mind she was calling it Together, Apart, though it wouldn’t really need a formal title; she wouldn’t want it ever to be sold, not in her lifetime. After that, Robert could do with it what he liked.
The idea had come to Della during the weeks Christine had spent in hospital. Terrible weeks, lost weeks; days blurring into night and night into day, time suspended, elastic, now speeding past, now ponderously slow. They had not been able to visit; only Lizzy had been permitted, pending negative tests, wearing scrubs and a visor and a mask, all the equipment that had been so culpably lacking in the beginning, but that still, Della feared, gave its wearers only an illusion of control. The inability to visit Christine, to be with her in her suffering, had been almost more than Della could bear: she’d been frantic, pacing the house and garden, howling at the moon (or, more often, at Robert). Most evenings, Lizzy drove over from the hospital; sat at the kitchen table, the night high and still beyond the glass, drinking their wine, offering snatches of information that Della absorbed like rare missives from another, distant world. The day Christine died they had sat there again, the three of them, for hours; drunk, by the end of it, horribly drunk, sad and angry and sobbing, stumbling to bed just before dawn, each of them falling into a separate blackening sleep.
Della had seen it clearly that night, this idea that had been hovering in the corners of her mind: two sculptures, placed close together, one a perfect circle, drawn from the belly of the other. This was how it worked for her, the genesis, the source: an image, fuzzy and indistinct, appeared (she didn’t know where from: did anyone?) and began, over weeks, sometimes months, to assume solid, three-dimensional form. It was only then, once the image was developed, settled – once the real physical labour of manufacture had begun – that Della could begin to assign some meaning to it, to work out what she might, with this work, be trying to say. In the old days, she’d scorned such retrospective thinking: ‘prettifying’, she’d called it, insisting on art for art’s sake, form over function, the artist’s biography, even their intentions, irrelevant. She’d seen it as a way of belittling women in particular, of ensuring that they remained excluded from the grown-ups’ table, the place where the real artists – almost always men – made art that was allowed to speak for itself. But Della had, in this as in so many other ways, softened over time; the gallerists, critics, interviewers demanded such things. Everybody needed a story.
What, then, was the story here? Their story – hers and Robert’s – and hers and Christine’s, too. One too complex, too multifaceted, to reduce to easy statements, pat phrases turned worn and familiar by repetition. Well, with this piece, I was thinking about … You see, at this time in my life, I was … No; this sculpture would not be subjected to such dissection. It would remain private, between the two of them, and them alone.
Few people knew the real story of how Della and Robert had met. They had the facts – a blind date, a first meeting so cringeworthy, so fundamentally unlikely, knowing Della, that it was trotted out often as a source of laughter, of knowing self-deprecation. We were set up. I walked into the pub, and there he was … But the mechanics of their meeting had remained deliberately obscure.
This was because it was actually Della’s mother who had introduced them. Her mother, yes – Carys Evans, back in Swansea, in the three-bedroom semi with the three-piece suite and the rash of gnomes lining the weedless path to the front door. Carys Evans, whose boldest act had been to choose a name for her younger daughter on a whim, because she liked the sound of it, the music it made on her tongue.
Della was unapologetically snobbish about her mother, about every aspect of her origins; she’d felt different from them all for as long as she could remember, had believed herself destined for something, somewhere else – a conviction Carys had actively encouraged, fussing over her in a way she never really had with her elder daughter, Bethan. Della understood now, with the distance of time and maturity – and Bethan’s sullen insistence – that Carys had suffered after Bethan’s birth, that there had almost certainly been a period of undiagnosed postnatal depression. With Della, things had been different; their mother had, Bethan believed, been making up for what had gone wrong the first time. ‘You got everything you wanted,’ Bethan had told her frequently, before Della had stopped calling, before she’d allowed herself to pretend that she’d never had a sister, that Christine was the only sister she could ever need. ‘Everything was so easy for you. She told you you could do anything, be anyone. That’s not how it was with me.’
Carys, then, against all possible expectations, had been the architect of it all. Della was twenty-eight, living in Margate, having abandoned her secretarial course in London for art college in Canterbury. That was done, now – she had graduated, done her master’s, was living in a flat in Cliftonville, in a tall, crumbling house that faced the sea. Christine was upstairs, with her daughter Lizzy, now almost two; she’d got pregnant unexpectedly, after a one-time thing at a party. Della had vowed to be there for them, to help, almost as if she’d been the guy Christine had hooked up with without even knowing his name – nor, of course, his phone number or address.
Neither of them had a boyfriend, much less a husband. Christine said she wasn’t interested, her energies were all for Lizzy and the work she was doing when her daughter was asleep – intricate illustrations, ink and watercolour; she was thinking of making a series of children’s books. Della was painting – big, abstract daubs that she feared were meaningless, second-rate – and helping to look after Lizzy, and having her own causal encounters now and then, but nothing that stuck. She told herself she didn’t care, that this was freedom; but Carys was appalled, told her frequently on the phone that she was in danger of getting left on the shelf. What a phrase! Della laughed at her mother, told her how ridiculous she was, how provincial and small-minded. But if she were truly honest – which she rarely was, back then, with anyone, especially herself – the same worries dogged her, tugged at her sleeve. She was lonely, in truth; she loved Christine and Lizzy, but they were their own little unit, mother and child, and however close Della was to them, neither was truly hers.
So when her mother told her, one day, that there was someone she really thought Della ought to meet – the son of a friend’s friend from the Rotary Club, now making a big name for himself, and a salary to match, in London; working, Carys thought, as some kind of engineer – Della dismissed her, said she didn’t need a blind date, of all things. But the idea was sown, and germinated, and a few weeks later she’d walked into the pub on Charlotte Street, scanning heads and faces for that of a man named Robert Samuels, who would, she had been told, be sitting at the bar, reading that day’s copy of the Guardian. (Had it been the Telegraph, Della knew she would never have gone.) A man in a suit, standing rather than sitting, holding his newspaper in front of him like a shield. ‘Robert?’ she’d said, and he’d lowered it, and there he’d been: not tall, not short; neither particularly handsome, nor the opposite. Unremarkable, she’d thought, in every way; she’d almost turned and walked out, but then he’d smiled and offered to buy her a drink, and so she’d stayed, because she was thirsty, and she’d come all the way to London on the train so she might as well stick around to see what happened.
What happened was this. Robert bought her a sweet sherry (ordered as a joke, Della thinking of her mother, her Christmas thimbleful of Bristol Cream). She drank it in two swift gulps; he finished his pint. She bought a bottle of French plonk, asked for two glasses, found a table near the back of the pub. The bottle, perhaps, was the deciding factor; Della’s eye was no longer on the door. She liked him – he might be wearing a suit, he might look more like an insurance salesman than the rough-hewn, leather-jacketed types she usually went for – but that was the truth of it: she liked him. He was only a few years older – thirty – but his manners were quaint, old-fashioned; he held the door open for her when they left the pub, insisted on walking with her to the station. They parted at the bottom of the escalator; Robert was taking the Northern line, heading south (he lived in Clapham). Her destination was Victoria, and Kent. He told her what a great time he’d had, that he’d like to see her again, that he’d call; he had her number, her mother had passed it on. Della was non-committal. Maybe, yeah, let’s see. Robert looked at her for a long moment before kissing her on the cheek and going on his way. She watched his departing back as it was swallowed by the crowd.
Later, on the train to Margate, even as Della told herself that the evening had been a waste of time, that she wasn’t interested in Robert Samuels at all, she watched her shadowy reflection in the window, wondering what he’d thought of her, whether he’d found her attractive; wondering how long it would be until he called, and what she would say to him when he did.
The supermarket was busy: there were only two days to go until Christmas Eve.
‘Remind me why we didn’t order online again, Robert?’ Della said as they retrieved a trolley from the chain beside the door.
‘Because, my love’ – he was sorting the bags – ‘we like to see what we’re buying, don’t we? Especially at Christmas. It’s not the same, getting it all delivered.’
Della thought it was far worse, but did not say so aloud. She knew he enjoyed it all – the music, the decorations, the supermarket workers wearing reindeer antlers and tinsel boas, even the crowds of shoppers, who were mostly good-natured, seasonally smiling – smiles you could actually see, now that so many people were no longer bothering with masks. Della had burnt all of hers – actually burnt them, cast them witch-like, gleeful, on to one of Robert’s midsummer bonfires. (That appetite for drama again.) Robert still had his, he still wore it quite often, said he didn’t want to tempt fate; normality, they all knew now, was too fragile a concept to take for granted.
Della sighed; she hated food-shopping at the best of times. ‘Can we start at the other end, with the wine? Work our way back?’
The look Robert gave her was pained; he had a system, especially at Christmas. Start with the fruit and veg, then move round logically, aisle by aisle. Avoid the buy-one-get-one-free offers and anything that had flown too far. He had his list with him, and a pen to tick off each item as they placed it in the bags. The list was in his hand now. He looked down; following his gaze, Della scanned the first few lines. Parsnips. Potatoes. Brussels sprouts.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘As we were.’
Music rattled from ceiling speakers: the Pretenders, ‘2000 Miles’. One of Robert’s favourites. She was pushing the trolley; he was by the potatoes, waiting politely for a woman in a Father Christmas jumper to step out of his way – the vegetable section was rammed, everyone everywhere, for one portion of the year, wanting to buy exactly the same thing. She watched him lean down, examine the boxes of potatoes in their plastic sacks. He straightened, turned. ‘King Edwards or Maris Pipers?’
She smiled. There was comfort in this, wasn’t there: the yearly ritual, the choosing, the preparing, the cooking; the running smoothly along the usual, expected grooves, whatever chaos and confusion the year had brought. ‘We like the King Edwards, don’t we? Better for roasting.’
He returned her smile; boyish suddenly, happy, she knew, in the simplicity of the decision, of this small, shared choice. ‘Yes. King Edwards it is.’
They roamed the aisles; the trolley filled up, until pushing it became a strain. Robert took over, handed her the list. ‘Here. Christmas pudding next. And mince pies. You’re not still thinking of making any, are you?’
Della shook her head. They had taken to baking them together, she and Christine, finding a free December afternoon, putting on their aprons and covering the kitchen – the oast’s, usually; it was bigger, the range superior – in flour and smears of jarred mincemeat. It was a game, really, a kind of playtime, assuming the role both of them had avoided in their real lives: the country wife, brisk and capable, ruling her domestic empire. Christine had cooked, of course – there had been no one else to do it for her – but only from necessity, with no real pleasure. Della also made meals when she had to, but with a similar indifference. The oast kitchen was Robert’s domain; he was a wonderful cook and it was, they agreed, the primary outlet for his creativity. His work had been creative once, perhaps – the bridges, the roads, the big civil projects – there had been beauty in these, but age and success had carried him further from the work he loved into strategy, management, consultancy. It depressed him, Della knew, it depressed her, too. But what was there to do? In a few years, Robert would retire and then he could do what he liked. Cook, she supposed; and garden; and potter around the house in his slippers like the old man he was.
They had never married, never had children. Most assumed these had been Della’s choices, but this was not so: she had asked Robert to marry her several times, the first of these just months after they’d met, when they were in bed together in the flat in Cliftonville.
It was the middle of the day, a Saturday; they could hear Lizzy running around upstairs (it was extraordinary how much noise a toddler could produce on bare boards). They had been in bed since the previous evening, when Della had met Robert from the London train; she’d gone out for fish and chips, brought them back to bed, and the sheets were now faintly rank with salt and vinegar and chip-grease. Robert was astonishing in bed; there was so much about him that she hadn’t expected. He knew his music – the more alternative, the better; some of the bands he loved she’d never come across, not even at art school – and he had a talent for poker, attended a weekly game. Her early barricades had been demolished. Della was hooked, obsessed, hardly able to paint, late for her shifts at the café, unable to think about anything but him, and them, and this: the two of them together, unclothed, undressing for each other, too, the shapes and mysteries of their respective pasts.
‘We should get married, shouldn’t we?’ she said. ‘Have a big white wedding. A meringue. Pageboys. Everything. My mother would be beside herself.’
They were lying on their backs, watching the ceiling, their legs entwined. She felt his body shift and resettle as she spoke. The silence that followed was long and strained, filled with the footsteps of the stampeding elephant upstairs. Della was determined not to break it; she withdrew her leg from his, lay motionless beside him. Eventually, Robert said, ‘It is amazing, this thing, Della, it really is. But you need to know this: I don’t want to get married and I don’t want to have children. Not with you, not with anyone. I really don’t, and I won’t. I need you to understand that, to really understand. I won’t ever change my mind.’
This had not, Della knew, landed as quite the revelation it should have been; she had actually laughed, shifted on to her front, placed her arm across his chest. ‘Silly man. For God’s sake, who’s talking about children? I was only joking, anyway.’
She was twenty-eight years old, and she had Lizzy, had her work; she wasn’t absolutely sure she wanted children, and the marriage idea had been a whim. Months passed. Robert moved in with her, let his flat, commuted to London. Della found studio space in an abandoned warehouse, her work deepened and matured; there were exhibitions, a few sales, she was able to quit her job at the café (there was Robert’s money, too; he insisted on covering the mortgage, and her peppercorn studio rent). It was when Della turned thirty – a dreadful cliché, she supposed, but there it was, even the most banal things could be true – that the thoughts returned to her; thoughts she had not expected, not chosen, but that floated through her mind of their own volition. A wedding: a public commitment, a party, a pair of fine gold rings. Children, shadowy and nameless – the idea of children, really, not their messy, demanding reality. Lizzy was almost five now, and about to start school; she was wonderful, surprising, her own small, determined being, but she wasn’t Della’s own.
She asked him again – let’s get married, let’s think about kids – and his reaction astounded her. Robert was furious, angrier than she’d ever seen him; he actually shouted, slammed the door, and went off to spend the night in a hotel. (She wondered now, with the distance of time and experience, whether a good deal of his anger had sprung from guilt, or at least fear – the fear that he was denying her too much, that he might lose her.) That night, Della barely slept; in the morning, still early, she called her mother, sure of the advice she would be offered. Leave him. Walk away. He’s not serious about you. Call it off. Della was, after all, still on the proverbial shelf. Her mother loved Robert, told everyone she knew that she’d solved the problem of her daughter’s singledom herself; but at this, surely, Carys would draw the line.
But Carys, too, had surprised her. She was just up, smoking her first cigarette; Della could picture her, there in the Swansea kitchen, with its fitted pine units and tiles printed with pictures of wicker baskets and bread loaves. Carys listened, and after a lengthy pause she spoke, in that lovely sing-song voice Della had realised, in that moment, she missed; she had lost her own Welsh accent, softened it, at first deliberately, then without noticing, with all the time she’d spent away – as far as she could get, really, without falling off the land mass of their shared island.
‘Della,’ her mother said. ‘Children are wonderful. You know I love you and Bethan more than anything. But they’re not the only thing. One day, they leave, and then it’s just the two of you. Is Robert the man you want to be with then? If so, think very carefully. Don’t just throw that away. And anyway’ – she drew deeply on her Benson & Hedges – ‘you have your art, don’t you? It’s going well, and it’s important to you. Are you sure there’s room to be a wife and mother, too?’
Robert stayed in the hotel for three nights. When he returned, they were both chastened; for weeks they were solicitous with one another, extravagantly kind. The argument slipped off into the past, and it was only over time – weeks and months, summer shifting into autumn and onwards into winter, which was cold that year: angry, gusting winds, testy, whipping sea – that Della realised her decision had been made. And she did not regret it – not often, not in any serious way. For this was what she had, what she had chosen – this man, this home, this life. And if she wondered, sometimes, about the children there might have been had Robert felt differently – saw the shapes of their faces, sometimes, in her dreams – it was only briefly, their images as vague and transient as shadowy reflections in old foxed glass.
There was wine still to buy, and spirits, and a few more gifts: something for the cleaner, Ilona; something for Les, the postman, who always left their parcels at the front door, even when they weren’t in; something for Eddy at Valley Motors, who serviced the car, had saved them so much money and hassle over the years.
Booze, too, for Fran and Adam’s party. Gin, and cognac, and tequila for Lizzy, who loved a margarita, though they didn’t know yet whether she was coming with them; all of it went into the trolley and the bags, now stacked on top of one another, so full that Della feared the uppermost bottles might slide off and crash on to the floor.
‘Here,’ Robert said, ‘let me rearrange things.’ Della let him – neither would dispute that he was the more practical of the two – and took her phone from her bag. A missed call from Lizzy, and a message. Della opened it, and a smile crept across her face.
‘Who’s that?’ said Robert.
‘Lizzy. She tried to call just now. Then sent a message. Listen. Dearest D, just tried to ring – is it today you’re doing the big shop? I’d have come and helped if so. Just wanted to tell you that something’s shifted for me – I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’m feeling so much better. Happier. More productive. Like Radiohead – ha! (Ask Robert what that means.) Just wanted to let you know this. Maybe I will come on Christmas Eve after all, if that’s OK with you both? I might even make it to Fran’s party. Much love. Call me when you’re done.’
They stared at each other across the loaded trolley.
‘Radiohead?’ Della said. ‘What does she mean?’
Robert was grinning. ‘It’s from a song. “Fitter Happier”. One of their best.’
‘That’s wonderful then, isn’t it? That she’s feeling better?’
‘It is,’ he said, and he leant over, kissed her. ‘It really is.’
That night, after Robert had gone to bed – he was tired, had slept poorly again – Della went out to her studio.
The night was black and icy; there was so little light pollution out here, though they could hear the thrum of the motorway when the wind blew towards the house, and the sky was filled with stars. The deep darkness of the lane beyond the gravel drive still frightened her. Pathetic, really, childish, but even childish fears had their origins. Della hurried on; the studio was unlocked and she’d left the electric heater plugged in, knowing she might return.
Robert’s sculpture – its wax version, at least – stood in the middle of the huge, high-ceilinged room; the building had once been a barn, they assumed this had been where they’d kept the sacks of hops, or maybe the horses and their carts. Now it was where she worked: her space, familiar, everything exactly where she wanted it. A room of her own. She was lucky, in this and in so many ways. She stood for a moment, taking in the form of the sculpture under its sheet; there was work still to be done, just a few finishing touches, she’d take a few hours the following day, before Fran’s party. For now, it was enough to stand here and know that it existed, this thing she had made – for Robert, for herself, for the life they shared.