Chapters (40)
- Cover
- About the Author
- PENGUIN BOOKS
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- THE BEGINNING
Or by birthdays: Sasha’s, and Irene gave her a hamster with sharp yellow teeth which bit Clem’s finger when she stuck it through the bars of the cage; Clem’s (an Arsenal football kit), Aggie’s, Adrian’s, her own. By the secondary schools she and Sasha and, once, Adrian visited together, traipsing through classrooms smelling of sweat and sawdust, looking at essays about Jane Eyre or First World War poets stuck to noticeboards, trying to imagine Sasha, so skinny and cautious, there among children who already looked like confident adults. By six-monthly dental checkups. By parents’ evenings. By terms and pinched holidays. By new school shoes. By teaching Clem to ride a bike without stabilizers – running skewed along the pavement, ready to catch her as she toppled.
By the imperative turn of weeks: the Saturdays when Adrian collected them at ten and brought them back at six and she was faced with the problem of longed-for, unfilled time (once she even got on an underground train and went round full circle, watching the stops until, an hour and a quarter later, she was back where she had started). The Sundays when she took them swimming and washed their hair and Aggie shrieked like a witch.
By nettles growing tall in the garden. By lawyer’s bills. By the flats she visited, trudging from room to room and trying to imagine living there.
By music for the violin – from ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ to ‘Ho Down’, ‘Clocks and Watches’, ‘Au Clair de la Lune’, ‘Lullaby’, a tango, a waltz; formidable names like Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Elgar. Catherine Wattisham came to her house now and she stood with her arms folded watching Irene struggle as the music sheets grew darker with the keeling forests of more complicated notes, semi-quavers and slurs and sharps.
By estate agents’ visits and the apparent fall in the value of the house. People tripping round the rooms that she’d spent hours tidying up, pressing fingers into damp walls, opening cupboards, staring at beloved objects till they turned shabby under their gaze.
By the dwindling amount of food in her supermarket trolley: no more red meat, no more wheat beer, no more goat’s cheese, taramasalata, grapefruit, stem-ginger biscuits, marmalade …
By the words Aggie learnt to spell out, following the huge letters across the page with her stubby finger.