Chapter 25 #2
On Saturdays, she buys fresh bread from the local bakery and picks up two thick weekend newspapers.
She reads slowly across the course of the week, enjoys leaving the supplements on a side table in the living room, or by her bed.
These signs of life, this trail of her own self inhabiting a space, with no need to clear away the evidence, still makes her sigh with unexpected contentment.
So, too, does the sound of the Roberts radio she has in the kitchen.
It is the female voices she wants to hear—their stories, their take on life.
These women, with so many different experiences amongst them, finding their way into her home, opening the door to a wider world with their humor, their insight, their passion.
She still jumps when a car door slams outside or if there’s an unexpected knock on the door.
Her body bears the scars and creaks of one that has not been well looked after.
She tries to soften it with yoga and Pilates, but there is no escaping the arthritis that has crept into broken bones never properly set.
She feels the weight of her children’s concern and the responsibility they feel toward her.
During lockdown, they made pavement visits, left sanitized gifts on her doorstep.
“Are you sure you’re doing okay? You could come and stay with one of us? You don’t have to be alone.” Although they all knew that couldn’t work, with Maia and Kate working at the hospital; Ida going into school.
“I’m fine! I have books and podcasts. The whole of the internet for company!” These things still feel shiny and new, even now.
They’d looked skeptical, as though she was trying to make the best of things.
Somehow unable, even having witnessed the daily reality of her life, to truly understand that she had endured a much more draconian lockdown for over forty years.
Covid-19, she could do; this one, for her at least, would be easy.
And she had Gordon—the child she’d struggled to bond with, the young man she’d once found so unknowable—to thank for this liberation.
When he’d first moved back home, after the car accident, he’d kept his distance in the house, as though relearning his place within it.
But she remembers the night things changed.
He’d come in from meeting Maia for dinner.
Cora had been in the kitchen, folding clothes still warm from the dryer.
She’d heard him at the front door, kicking off his shoes, hanging up his coat.
One foot on the stairs, two. But then he’d appeared in the kitchen doorway, his hair wet with rain.
“I was thinking on the train back tonight, you must miss her. Maia.”
Cora had looked up, surprised. The bare truth of his words was disconcerting; she so rarely allowed herself to miss her girl.
“Oh, yes. Yes, I do,” she said, smoothing the creases from a shirt.
“I think she misses you, too,” he said. “Did you know she’s taking a sabbatical soon? A month in Australia with a friend.”
She’d let the clothing drop. Because, no, she had no idea; she knew none of the details of her daughter’s life. A rush of questions hovered at her lips, but then his father appeared beside him, and she returned to her folding.
“Good evening?” he asked.
“Yes, a gallery and then we went to a restaurant at the bottom of Long Acre.”
“It’s all right for some. I’ve been stuck here with only your mother’s burned offerings.”
And her son—her strange and inscrutable son—had replied, “Do you know, you always say that, but I can’t actually remember Mum ever burning a meal.”
She hadn’t dared look up, hadn’t dared acknowledge the exchange, but she heard her husband clear his throat, and from the corner of her vision, saw it was his shoes that turned to leave the room first. Then Gordon, a few moments later.
One afternoon, when her husband was still at work, Gordon had come home and found her in the dining room watering the houseplants.
“I thought you might like this,” he’d said, putting a bar of chocolate down on the table.
She’d looked at him, unsure if it was a trap.
He must have seen her uncertainty because he said, “It’s okay.
I won’t tell.” And so they’d sat across from one another, the bar open between them, and had each taken a piece or two.
She can still remember how that first square had softened against the roof of her mouth, how its flavor had spread across her tongue, sweetness like a warm towel after a bath.
“It’s good stuff, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s from this little shop that’s opened up in town, just past the common. It does cards and stuff too. You’d like it.” She was touched. That he’d imagined her enjoying visiting that shop. Any shop. “They had samples. Almond and salted caramel, I think.”
“That sounds nice,” she said.
He nodded, then added, “They only offered me one on the way out. Otherwise, I would’ve got you some.”
“No, no,” she said, keen not to upset the delicate balance of whatever this was. “This is amazing. I can’t imagine anything tasting better than this. How did your sight test go?”
“Oh, they just said to get some off-the-shelf glasses for reading.” He fumbled around in his bag and brought out a case. “What do you think?”
Cora smiled, said they suited him, realizing that her son—her child—was aging. That in a few years he would be thirty-five, then forty, quickly fifty—might even begin to lose his hair or go gray.
Gordon folded the wrapper back into his bag, then swept the table clean with the side of his hand, the other out flat to catch any crumbs. “Thank you,” Cora said. And she wondered if he knew she meant not just for the chocolate, but for taking care not to leave any trace.
At dinner, Cora was on edge, unsure if her son would give her away, but he didn’t. And after that, it became a regular thing to share those forbidden treats.
Gradually, they began to talk. Cora would ask how his day had been, or how Maia was. And he’d tell her about something that had interested him at Rob’s studio, or a painting he’d seen.
“You know, Michelangelo, he wasn’t just an artist. He did all these dissections, and when you really study his paintings, you can see he’s hidden anatomical images in them.
Look, I’ll show you,” he said, taking out his mobile.
He passed her the phone, and she held it—tentatively—as though it might explode in her hands.
“That’s right, like this to zoom in. Yeah, like you’re pinching the screen. ”
She’d laughed then. At the oddness of seeing the image growing larger beneath her fingertips.
“It’s a ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Can you see where—” he said, pointing.
“Oh, yes! Isn’t that incredible?” she said, as she realized God and a posse of angels were emerging from a kidney, rather than some indistinguishable shape. They sat in silence as she zoomed out, then in again. “Wow,” she breathed, her amazement extending far beyond the painting.
On the night Gordon told his father he’d got the job at the gallery, Cora had looked on as the older man gave a dismissive sniff and asked, “Does it pay as much?”
“As banking?”
“What else might I be referring to? That was your last line of work, wasn’t it?”
“It doesn’t, but I’m unlikely to find that salary—or the bonuses—anywhere else.”
“And you think you’ll be able to cope? Without your flashy car and ￡300 dinners?”
Cora had winced to hear him refusing to acknowledge their son was a different person now.
But rather than lob a grenade back, she’d seen Gordon’s shoulders visibly loosen, watched his hands raise in submission, as if to say, I don’t know.
You’ve got me there. You win. There was a subtle power in bowing out.
It left his father empty-handed, the stick he’d been about to beat him with disintegrated.
A few months later, their son announced he was ready to move out.
Cora had been expecting it. He’d stayed longer than she’d anticipated, and she suspected that might have been for her sake.
She tried not to let her disappointment show, but she could already feel herself missing him beside her in the kitchen as she cooked, clearing up around her, ready to absorb whatever error or mistake she might make—No, it was me who chipped the plate—his presence easing her isolation.
“I’ve left a phone and some money in a plastic box buried under the hydrangea.
For emergencies,” he’d said, on the morning he was due to leave.
And she realized that must have been what he was doing when he went out to the garage for gardening tools a few days earlier.
“You’d only notice the earth’s been disturbed if you knew to look for it. ”
It was the most explicit he’d been in discussing her situation and his sensitivity made her eyes fill.
“Thank you, but I’ll be fine,” she’d said, even though it felt like her mother leaving her on the first day of school.
Cora had turned back to cleaning the cupboard doors then—thinking about her mum, their lack of goodbye, that she didn’t get to go to her funeral; it still hurt—Gordon leaving was already pain enough to bear for one day.
It was only hours after he’d left that the lid on the pressure cooker blew off, hitting the kitchen wall, releasing a hiss of scalding steam.
She spent that week sleeping on the floor beside the bed with nothing to cover her.
Was yanked awake by her hair. Had her face pushed into a plate of food he insisted was cold, even as it burned her cheeks.