From Abandonment

At half past five in the morning on 1 December 1949 Rita realises she was wrong. She doesn’t like it. She also realises that everything has changed, but nothing is different. She doesn’t like that either.

She would rather not have woken, but the night had forsaken her. Currents of warm air had carried her up, out of her dreams, to the misty grey daylight making its way through the chink between the curtains and the wall. She had tried to hold on to the darkness by not opening her eyes. She wanted to bear the dark inside her, to both own it and be owned, as if it were a child that belonged to a mother whilst laying claim to her entirely. Meanwhile she wanted to be a child herself, protected and lost deep inside the night. But like every other morning, that was impossible. Who can capture a night? The day awaited, wide open. Rita knew it, but still she lay in her bed with her eyes shut, in house number 37 on Grange Park Avenue in north London. The milk float had just driven down the road, stopping as usual at every house to deliver its creamy white cargo; she had heard the reassuring clink of the glass bottles in her sleep. 

The transition from inertia to wakefulness takes perhaps half a second. Yet still it seems a long uphill struggle. The kaleidoscope of dreams has to abate, the grains of colour forming one picture after another dissolve, time and sequence supplant impressions flowing freely. The chambers of the night are not the same as real ones; figures pass, always on their way to somewhere else. In her dreams Rita is often standing by a window looking out across dense fields of wheat or of apple trees heavy with fruit. The abundance on the other side of the glass seems out of reach, yet still it comforts her. From time to time her drowned brother Emil visits her, as if the poor thing doesn’t know he has been dead for forty years. He looks sad even when he smiles. Sometimes she takes his hand and holds it. They have a moment together, smiling gravely at each other without uttering a word. Rita likes the inexplicability of night. At times even when she is awake she might long for the great field of pale green grass, for its gentle whisper. Such things as these Rita dreams about; the singing of a field of wheat.

Although her eyes were still closed, she knew her husband lay beside her in the bed and she could tell from his breathing he was still asleep, surrounded by dreaming images illuminated by a different light, inhabited by people other than those of her dreams. He was lying a couple of inches away, but the distance between them had long since lost its measure. We are close enough to be out of sight, she had mused. It suited her very well.

Finally she had let go of the night. She had sat up, put on her spectacles, and established that the world looked the same as it had the previous evening. The dressing table was still in the corner. Her hairbrush was in its rightful position, next to the small box in which she kept the key to wind the bedroom clock and a pale pink pearl from a broken necklace. The box of colourless glass caught the soft morning light. A rearing horse had been etched on the lid and there was an indentation where she used to rest her cigarette while she brushed her hair. The chest with six drawers stood against one wall and the wardrobe against the other. On each side of the bed was a bedside table with a glass of water partly drunk. It had been a morning identical to the preceding morning, just as she liked it. The day needed to be true to type. Everything needed to stay the same. Rita had stepped into her slippers, donned her dressing gown, and opened the heavily lined curtains. Outside, the clouds had descended to the rooftops, rendering the brick-coloured suburb blurred and diffused. It looks like dust, she had thought, the world needs wiping with a cloth to make it shine. Apart from that, everything had been as normal. The houses opposite had a haughty appearance, with their steps up from the pavement and their white-painted gutters; a neighbouring family had recently managed to buy a car, a Morris Minor, and every evening the father parked it in exactly the same place outside his front gate so that no-one could doubt the owner. There it had been this morning as well, with droplets of condensation on its gleaming dark blue paintwork. 

It is 1 December 1949 and Rita is standing as usual by the bedroom window on the first floor of her house looking out across the street of solid semis interspersed with gaps of green, noting how the mist transforms the suburb into patches of colour that merge together, and this is the moment when she realises that she was wrong. The day may seem like any other day, the morning may ostensibly be identical to the previous morning and all the mornings before that, but it is an illusion. 

‘Are you happy now?’ he had asked when they were on their way to Ye Olde Cherry Tree to celebrate. Rita knew he didn’t want to start another argument, but fury had closed her lips and paralysed her thoughts and it was impossible to reply. She had nodded, and not wishing to spoil the moment, she didn’t answer back, not today, not when they had finally got it done. But she avoided his eye.

It had happened. They had booked an appointment. He had telephoned his brother and told him he couldn’t come to the office and they had put on their best clothes and taken the bus three stops to Enfield. 

But it’s all too difficult to take in, Rita thinks. Not because it had been particularly great, fantastic or happy, the happiest day of her life, not at all, but because it seemed trivial and prosaic, one of the least dramatic things two people could do together. So ordinary the brain wouldn’t deem it worthy of being stored as a memory. But it had happened, it happened yesterday. They had even received a certificate bearing the borough council’s stamp, but the envelope lay unopened in the hall with the unpaid bills. Is she happy now? she wonders as she gazes at the street mottled with colour, a December palette of brick red, evergreen and dawn-mist grey. Are you happy now? she says aloud. And on he sleeps, unable to hear her reply. 

The mist dissipates before her eyes, the clouds retreat to the sky, or wherever clouds reside, as if they suddenly tire of obscuring people’s lives. She isn’t looking forward to the day, but it lies ahead. She isn’t looking forward to the chores, but they are hers to do. She isn’t looking forward to the routine, but she tolerates it. The ebb and flow of familiar notions are her natural element. Despite being humdrum they are a source of dependable joy, like the satisfaction a traveller feels, standing on a platform safe in the knowledge the trains are on time. Because that is joy as well, isn’t it? Rita thinks. Not the euphoria of crackling fireworks, not the delirium of confetti-swirling victory parades, but the calm, controlled rejoicing born of a world that proves to be reliable. Reality dispels her doubts and that brings her a special kind of happiness. Champagne and icing on the cake aren’t everything, she thinks. Thank heavens.

A few leaves fall from the oak tree across the street. As Rita watches them descend, she sinks too — into the next secret. What happened yesterday must never be divulged. It has to remain in tightly sealed silence for the rest of their lives; she needs that, her honour requires it. He has to swear never to tell a soul about it, ever. No-one can know that they did it in the end, because then it would be obvious it hadn’t been done before. Nothing turns out the way you expect, Rita muses. Not even a wedding. 

She walks down the stairs, the floorboards creaking under the maroon carpet, and into the kitchen. The cat is mewing outside the back door. Rita opens it and the animal darts past her in a flurry of ginger, aggrieved at having been made to wait. Rita lights a cigarette and goes to bring in the newspaper and the milk bottles. She flings the front door wide open and the cold morning meets her face like the spray of a huge wave, enters the house and dilutes the night air, displacing the stale exhalation of three people sleeping. She stands for a while, the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and looks at the street. The air is clear now and silent. The main function of air in the overall scheme of things, Rita thinks, is to give birds something to fly through. 

She gazes across the neighbours’ gardens, some sporting the latest fashion in plastic flowers and brightly coloured garden gnomes, others with boxwood hedges meticulously trimmed and shaped. She looks at her own front garden of hydrangeas. The flowers remain, defiant, as if they don’t acknowledge winter; they have faded, of course, and are brittle as paper, but still they are full-blown globes. No-one has hydrangeas like Rita’s, so many and so dense. At first they are blue, deep pink, pale pink, cold violet — and later yellowed, dried, increasingly resembling handwritten scribbles after a night of dreams. In summer the hydrangea bushes spill over the wall by the pavement and the branches score thin white lines on the bare arms of passers-by. Sometimes a neighbour might complain, and Rita listens, nodding, she understands; but she never cuts her hydrangeas back.  

She wants to see it all, on this morning when the world seems to be as always but nothing is actually the same: the snails crawling over the stone wall, the pale yellow rose standing just inside the gate, still bearing the occasional new bud, and the insects floating on the surface in the barrel of rainwater, thin black streaks of death and transparent wings.

I am rich, she thinks. The silence of the oak trees, the white film left by the milk around the inside of the glass, the rustle of hedge-sparrows under the shrubbery. Hydrangeas grow in my garden, cascading in greenery over the world. Der Herr ist mein Hirte; mir wird nichts mangeln. I shall not want, she thinks. I shall not want. But I want for something, and I don’t know what that is. 

The cigarette smoke rises to the sky. The darkness inside me is a kind of happiness as well, Rita thinks, and for one short moment she believes that to be true.

Now he, her husband, is up and awake too. Rita hears water in the pipes and knows he is filling the basin with equal amounts of water from the hot tap and the cold tap, and he will then wash himself methodically from head to toe, in the same way every morning: the everyday ordinary, the ordinary everyday. She has heard the same sound for two decades. The cigarette has burned out. She ought to go in, but she holds the front door open. Mother should see me now, Rita thinks. My gate and my garden, my front door and my hall with its telephone table, my sitting room, my fitted carpet, my dining room and my kitchen, my three bedrooms and my bathroom. She should see the electric fire in the hearth with the logs that light up orange inside as if the flames were real, and she should see the piano the girls do their practice on. She should see the concave wall-mirror in the gilt frame, making the world seem so much bigger and rounder than it really is. If her mother could see all this, she would know that nothing had been in vain. Rita’s life at number 37 Grange Park Avenue was the final destination, the reward for sacrifices made. I come from endeavour, Rita thinks. My origin lies in hard graft.

Instead of going into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, she takes a rake and starts to clear the dead leaves from the ground under the hydrangeas. Just five minutes, she thinks, just a little while. She feels unexpectedly like a thief, and she enjoys it. She is stealing from her own routines, from duty itself, the backbone of her existence, but today she has no desire to stand tall and do her duty, she doesn’t feel like it. It is as simple as that. She is a five-minute Robin Hood, who takes from the winter morning and gives to herself. And besides, Rita likes the sensation of the rake scraping the damp earth, the scratch of pebbles and dry leaves; she savours the mechanical action the work requires, the repetition that sets her thoughts free while her body is busy with something else.