Chapter Seven

I LIE AWAKE. My neck feels stiff. My pillow is wet. The street outside is silent – we’re having to sleep with the windows open because of the heat – as is the flight path. An opal light steals through a gap in the curtains. Fresh tears dribble out of my eyes and slide into my ears.

I am remembering how, when I first showed Dad my engagement ring, he’d brought it to his lips and kissed it. He will never see it again, will never phone here again and wheeze a message into our answer machine. I will never again feel his embrace.

He died from an aneurysm, but they couldn’t operate. Audrey, when I phoned her last night, explained that the drug in Dad’s system, skittling around his blood to prevent further strokes, was the same anti-clotting agent that made surviving surgery impossible. He has, I feel, been cheated by science. An act of bad faith that confirms my worst fears: that diligent planning counts for nothing. After I put the phone down, I had a vision of Audrey doing the same thing in her flat. Beside her phone stands one of his vases; I bet she stroked it once we’d finished our call.

I used to love watching him throw pots on the wheel. His studio was at the back of our semi, where Mother would have preferred a sunroom. Its walls were covered with postcard reproductions, and yellowing articles torn from newspapers; reviews of exhibitions to be visited; interviews with artists. Many were marked with stars, in his red biro.

I never stopped being amazed by how he could make things so solid, so permanent, from lumps of clay – pots, vases, even a tea service. The whole process fascinated me: rolling up his sleeves, selecting clay from the plastic-lidded dustbin he kept outside; weighing lumps in his hand, feeling their density, their elasticity; removing all the air bubbles to stop the pot exploding in the kiln, which he did by slamming it down on his table, and which I was allowed to do when I got bigger, cutting it in half with cheese wire to check for further air bubbles, and kneading it like bread.

Perched on the corner of Dad’s table, or rather on piles of colour supplements, I’d watch him preparing the wheel – wetting the plate, kicking the pedal, getting it to the right speed. Once he was sitting comfortably with his thighs either side, he would slam the clay on to the plate, right in the middle, never missing. Then he’d kick the pedal, cradle the clay, and slop water gently over it, monitoring it closely, keeping his body firm (letting the clay know who’s boss, he called it); and from nowhere a smooth ball would emerge, and then a glistening cone, a stalagmite. And then, using his left hand to keep things steady, he used his right middle finger and thumb to create a well in the clay, pulling it up, slowly, carefully, until he had the shape he wanted.

I have a couple of those vases still.

I turn over. Beside me, Matt emits the settled breaths of deep sleep. I feel an ache in my chest. I long to cradle his head, and stroke the short, sandy hairs on his earlobes, or the butterscotch skin of his shoulders – like an object of holy reverence whose halo shines too brightly. I hesitate to reach out. I loved my dad and he is gone.

Finally, Matt opens his eyes. I like to think his sixth sense knew I was watching. He grins at me, and reaches out to wipe away some tears with a finger. ‘So sad,’ he whispers.

I sort of nod into the pillow.

‘How long have you been crying?’ he whispers.

It’s a simple question, with a solid answer. It makes Matt seem very wise, very safe; a sage who has been around for centuries. It’s how I know I can tell Matt anything, and he will not be destroyed, by my guilt, by my pain. I want to speak, but I keep remembering my father’s last chat with me, telling me he’d phone this weekend. I want to punch the headboard. Instead, I can feel more tears leaking out. Matt pulls me to him, and strokes my hair over and over again.

*

After Matt’s sister died, Matt’s mother struggled to leave her bedroom. When she did, it was to snap at Phoebe, or to take long baths. And yet to Matt it was as though she had for ever locked away a part of herself in the wardrobe – the part that used to laugh, and smile, and make orange curd, and sunbathe at the pool. Sometimes she got dressed, sometimes she didn’t; she shouted at her husband, and harangued the garden boys: the proteas had leaf blight, the bobotie was too dry, the sun was too hot, too cold.

At first, Matt was the only one she never shouted at. When he came home in the afternoon from school, she would look into his eyes and ask about his achievements, before rushing off to lie down. Over time, he found it necessary to up his game, to be not just a member of the cricket team but to be its captain, if he was to feel her touch at all; and avoid the lingering fear that he might be dismissed, like his sister.

Matt was sent to school in England when he was eleven; his paternal grandparents had now emigrated there, and they were paying. By then his mother was taking a variety of pills, which she complained made her mouth dry, or gave her insomnia. Every year, around Harvest Festival, she would announce that she was done with them for good, and make a show of throwing them away. Within two or three days she could be found on her hands and knees, sobbing uncontrollably, and a doctor had to drive twenty kilometres out to the farm to sedate her, and tweak her medication. And Matt would return home for the holidays to find a woman he barely recognised.

When he was fifteen, Matt won the science prize – a book of Freud’s collected works. In his study, beneath a poster for Led Zeppelin IV, he’d lie on his bed, devouring the essays, digesting their often bitter relevance. Here was someone making sense of his world, answering questions he wasn’t aware he’d longed to ask. Hungrily, he turned to others: to Laing, Klein, Winnicott, who shone their torches into the crevices of the human mind and soul. In reading these writers and their case studies, Matt felt somehow closer to himself, the mother he lost, and to the sister he never knew.

Matt was a junior house officer when, on a visit back to the farm, he saw the number of pills his mother took at each meal, and made discreet enquiries about therapy groups in the area. The nearest was thirty kilometres away in Nelspruit. Matt met the facilitator, and sat in on a group. He told his parents it was a book club; something neither of them had attended, and therefore a fact neither of them could dispute.

And once a week his mother drives to Nelspruit, and sits in a circle, and talks and listens, without realising she’s taking part in therapy at all.

*

After we make love, Matt dozes, I get up, slip on a T-shirt and head downstairs. In the kitchen, I light a rare cigarette from an old packet of Dylan’s and, taking a ramekin for the ash, sit on the step of the French windows, channelling smoke into the garden. The flagstones beneath my feet are already warm; it’s going to be another hot one.

I hardly ever smoke and, when I do, it’s only after sex. I giggle at the cliché – I don’t even own a lighter. Since talk of either activity earned my mother’s reproach, it seemed only fitting that the night I felt brave enough to cadge my first cigarette (from Angus, fellow Saturday worker at the local Marks and Spencer) was the same night I lost my virginity (good old Angus), these twin totems of so- called maturity for ever commissioned together in my memory, conspirators in a long-standing war of attrition.

I take a drag, swirl the dryness around my mouth, and slowly exhale, watching the smoke evaporate, leaving behind only a bitter taste. I’ll call you at the weekend. I grind the stub into the ramekin.

I am reminded of an article I read recently which said that death in a family is often followed by a birth. I scrabble for another cigarette. With the muscle memory of Matt inside me, what if I’m pregnant? And for one brief moment the flutter of panic in my chest seems so unbridled, so engulfing, so hard to swallow down, that I reckon this must be what it feels like to be one of Matt’s patients, my rivals for Matt’s attention.

Before I’ve had a chance to light a new ciggie, Matt’s voice reaches me from across the kitchen. ‘Heyyy!’ he says in that way he has of greeting me which makes this one syllable sound as though with my presence all his prayers have been answered.

‘Ach, man! Smoke,’ he complains, on kissing me, before sitting between my legs.

A cat ( get lost, rodent) sprints with a rustle from the foliage to rub itself against my darling husband’s shins.

‘Hello, boy,’ Matt enthuses, vigorously scratching its underbelly.

‘How do you know it’s the boy one?’ I say, trying to steady my voice and sound normal and curious, not fraught and jealous.

‘Tim? Because it looks like Tim.’ Just occasionally, Matt’s springbok lilt will hint at a subtext of Yes, my wife is daft as a brush. I bet he doesn’t use that tone at work.

‘But how can you tell them apart?’ Briefly my curiosity outweighs my anxiety.

Matt cranes his neck to look back up at me. ‘Well, wife. Could it be, as my patients tell me, that I’m a genius? Or that the cats look different? Now, let’s examine the evidence. Tim has white patches on his face—’ Matt turns back to the cat and buries his face in the fur. ‘Yes, you do! And Tallulah is—’ here Matt pauses, ‘—totally ginger. But, you’re right. It’s tricky!’

I snap the cigarette I’m holding. My husband is engrossed in tickling the cat. I open my mouth and close it again. It’s hard to confess to the one you love that you feel threatened by cats, especially female ones; that you fear they are your rivals in love.

I have to wait a good five minutes before Matt says, ‘Now bugger off, Tim. I want to hug my wife.’ He moves to sit on my step and pulls me towards him. I kiss his collarbone. He smells of sleep.

‘You know now Dad’s gone, I’m going to have to—’ My throat tightens and I can’t speak.

‘Get in touch with your mother? Yah, but not until after the funeral,’ whispers Matt, repeating what Audrey told us of Dad’s living will. ‘Be grateful for some breathing space.’

The will instructs me to delay informing mother of his death. Matt reckons Dad wanted to stop her turning up at the crematorium.

Matt circles me in the welcome billet of his arms. The sun is higher now, its golden wash sloping casually over the top of the garden wall. I am still in the shade, but a lozenge of light brushes half of Matt’s body, burnishing the tawny hairs on his skin, so that he appears as the luminous source of all that is good and safe in the world.