The door of the shed was unlatched and banging in the wind. People had carried off his tools, and the chair he’d bought me. The only thing they’d left, because it couldn’t be moved, was the fallen tree.
I went to sit down but remembering caused me to kneel in front of it in the dirt. And then, to fold my arms over it, to sink my head, breathing in the wet wood, hearing Patrick say how far along are you? Could I have a few days? I said I’m not going to wait for no reason, Patrick. I will see you at home.
Soon I was so cold I had to get up. I could not bear to leave. I had been pregnant once. I had been pregnant, here, and that made it sacred, this square of black mud that I would be abandoning to the elements. Leaving something that belonged to us unprotected from anyone who wanted it and thought it was no one’s anyway – there was nothing here except for a dead log. I picked up a twig and pushed it into the ground, and made myself walk back to the car, leaning into the wind.
In the immediate quiet of closing the door, I remembered Patrick telling me, as we drove to the Executive Home for the first time, that soon we would be self-sufficient, in the area of lettuce. I laughed, and I was still crying. Briefly, that first summer in Oxford, it had been true.
*
A mile on, I put the address into Google Maps, even though I had lived at Goldhawk Road since I was ten, bar the interruption of two short marriages. As I joined the motorway, the map lady said, in fifty-four miles take the left exit and when I missed it, make a U-turn as soon as possible.
37
THE FRONT DOOR of my parents’ house was ajar. I went in and found Ingrid on the sofa in my father’s study, sitting, with her feet on the ground, not lying the length of it with her feet on the armrest or extended in some way up the wall. And her eyes were fixed on my father, who was standing in the centre of the room, preparing to read something from a book open in his hands like a hymnal. And my mother was with them, holding a small feather duster – the likes of which I had never seen in the house – aloft over some object on the mantelpiece.
The impression they gave was of actors in a play, waiting for the curtain to open on them but too slow off their mark, so that just for a second the audience sees them that way – frozen in naturalistic positions – before they snap to action.
The mother starts waving the duster, the father begins reading from the middle of a sentence, the character of the sister leans forward like she is listening. That she is getting her phone out is obvious to those on the other side of the fourth wall. The father looks up and stops reading because another actor – clearly, the complicating character – is coming in, managing many bags. He invites her to sit down and the mother goes out saying something about coffee, and having enquired about her drive down, the father says, ‘Now where was I up to? Yes, here we go’ and starts again. One sister gives up the pretence of paying attention and looks openly at her phone.
The other one stands where she is, does not put down her bags but listens, giving the audience time to wonder about her backstory, why she has come, what she wants, what obstacles are ahead of her and how they will be resolved in ninety minutes. Whether there will be an interval. If the parking machine takes cards.
‘The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.’ He finishes. ‘Isn’t that brilliant, girls? It’s –’
‘Virginia Woolf.’
Ingrid said it without taking her eyes off her phone but then, anticipating his enquiry, lifted her head and said, ‘It was on Instagram.’
He said, ‘What is the Instagram?’
‘Here.’ She thumbed the screen and held the phone out to my father who took it and did a primitive imitation of scrolling that involved all the fingers on his right hand and a palsied flicking action with his wrist. ‘You can put any nonsense you like on it, even poetry, and someone will like it. One finger. Dad. Go up from the bottom.’
He mastered it and minutes later, my father declared @author_quotes_daily a repository of genius and then asked how much it cost to join. Ingrid told him his only outlay would be buying a mobile that didn’t have an aerial, which she said she would do for him online, to the expression of uncertainty that formed on his face at the mention of a retail interaction.
I said I needed to unpack. Ingrid offered to help me and got up.
Outside the door I told her I did not need help.
‘By help, I mean I’ll sit and watch you do it.’
She followed me to the stairs.