Mary Costello: The China Factory

‘Don’t leave it too late, Annie. She’s got an ear, she’s definitely got an ear. I said so to Don today.’

She carried Robin upstairs then and they left a little scent in their wake. It reminded me of the cream roses that clung to the arched trellis in our garden at home. No, it reminded me of Lucy. I think she has always given off this scent, like she’s discarding a surfeit of love. I wonder if all that wood and rosin and sheep gut suffocates her scent. I think of her sitting among the other cellists, her bulky instrument between her knees, her hair falling on one side of her face, the bow in her right hand drawing out each long mournful note, the fingers of her left hand pressed on the neck of the instrument or sliding down the fingerboard until I think she will bleed out onto the strings. I watched those hands today as they passed Robin a vase of flowers. She has taught Robin to carry the flowers from room to room as we move.

I turn and tiptoe into Robin’s room. The lamplight casts a glow on her skin and her breathing is so silent that for a second I am worried and think to hold a tiny mirror to her mouth, the way nurses check the breath of the dying. She is a beautiful child, still and contained and perfect, and so apart from me that sometimes I think she is not mine, no part of me claims her. Don has stayed home and is raising her and she is growing confident. Often at work I pause midway through typing a sentence, suddenly reminded of them, and I imagine them at some part of their day: Don making her lunch, talking to her teacher, clutching her schoolbag and waiting up for her along the footpath. I have an endless set of images I can call on. This evening as I pulled into the drive Don was putting his key in the door. The three of them, Don, Lucy and Robin, had been for a walk. It was windy, they had scarves and gloves on and their cheeks were flushed. Lucy and Robin laughed and waved at me as I pulled in. I sat looking at them all for a moment. Now I have a new image to call on.

If I ever have another child I will claim it — I will look up at Don after the birth and say ‘This one’s mine.’ I have it all planned.

After dinner this evening Don took the cold-water tap off the kitchen sink. He spread newspapers and tools over the floor and cleared the cupboard shelves and stretched in to work on the pipes. He opened the back door and went out and back to the shed several times and cold air blew through the house. After a while there was a gurgle, a gasp, and a rush of water spilled out along the shelf onto the floor. He jumped back and swore. Robin was in the living room watching Nickelodeon and Lucy was practising in the dining room. I had been roaming about the house tidying up, closing curtains, browsing. I had stepped over Don a few times and over the toolbox and spanners and boxes of detergent strewn around him.

‘What’s up?’ I asked finally. His head was in the cupboard. ‘What are you at?’ I pressed.

‘Freeing it up,’ he said, and I thought of the journey these three words had to make, bouncing off the base of the sink before ricocheting back out to me. ‘Did you not notice how slow it’s been lately?’

I leaned against the counter. The cello drifted in from the next room, three or four low-pitched notes, a pause, then the same notes repeated again.

‘Wouldn’t the plunger have cleared it?’ I watched his long strong torso and his shoulders pressed against the bottom shelf. He drew up one leg as he strained to turn a bolt. His brown corduroys were threadbare at the right knee and the sight of this and the thought of his skin underneath made me almost forgive him. The cello paused and then started again and I focused on the notes, and tried to recognise the melody. Lucy favours Schubert; she tells me he is all purity. I have no ear and can scarcely recognise Bach.

‘Is that urgent?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’

‘Can’t it wait then?’

I imagined his slow blink. Next door Lucy turned a page. I sensed her pause and steady herself before raising her bow again. A single sombre note began to unfurl into the surrounding silence and when I thought it could go on no longer and she really would bleed out of her beautiful hands, it touched the next note and ascended and then descended the octave and I thought this is Bach, this is that sublime suite that we listened to over and over in the early months of the pregnancy, and then never again, because Don worried that such melancholy would affect his unborn child.

‘Can’t you do these jobs during the day, when there’s no one here?’ I blurted. A new bar had begun and the music began to climb, to envelop, again.

He reversed out of the cupboard and threw the spanner in the box. ‘What the hell is needling you this evening?’

‘Shh. Keep your voice down. Please.’

It was Bach, and I strove to catch each note and draw out the title while I still could, before it closed in.

He began to gather up the tools and throw them in the toolbox. ‘Jesus, we have to live.’ I stood there half-listening. The music began to fade until only the last merciful note lingered. I can recognise the signs, the narrowing of his eyes as he speaks, the sourness of his mouth when he’s hurt and abhorred and can no longer stand me, and when the music stopped I longed to stop too, and gaze at him until something flickered within and his eyes met mine and we found each other again.

He leaned towards me then and spoke in a low tight voice. ‘What’s wrong with you, Ann? Why’re you so fucking intolerant?’

He slumped against the sink and stared hard at me and I looked out at the darkness beyond the window. I heard Lucy’s attempt to muffle our anger with the shuffle of her sheet music and cello and stand. I longed for her to start up again, send out a body of sound that would enrapture, and then I wondered if he had heard it, if it had reached him under the sink all this time, and if he’d remembered or recognised or recalled it. What was that piece , I longed to ask him, that sonata that Lucy played just now, the one we once loved, you and I?

I thought of them, Lucy, Don and Robin at the front door earlier. They had all been laughing. Who had said something funny? Robin is sallow like her father, with long dark hair, and some strands had blown loose from her scarf. Don was laughing too but when he saw my car he averted his eyes and singled out the key in his bundle. There was a look on his face. I have seen that look before. It is a dark downcast look and when he looked away this evening perhaps he was remembering another day, the day that I was remembering too.

Robin was newly born and Lucy, having just finished college, came to stay for a few weeks, to relieve us at times with Robin. I had wanted a child for a long time and now, when I recall them, I think those early days were lived in a strange surreal haze. At night, sleepless, I would turn and look at Don in the warmth of the lamplight, his dark features made patient and silent by sleep, and I would want to preserve us — Don, Robin and me — forever in the present then, in that beautiful amber glow.

I had gone into the city that day and wandered about the parks and the streets, watching my happy face slide from window to window. Light-headed, euphoric, I bought cigarettes and sat outside a café and watched people’s faces and felt a surge of hope. An old couple came out with a tray and sat down, hardly speaking but content. Young girls crowded around tables, flicking their long hair and chatting to boys. I lit a cigarette and bit off half of the chocolate that came with my coffee, saving the rest for later, to disguise the cigarette smoke on my breath. I had not smoked for years and the deep draw spiked my lungs and the surge of nicotine quickened my heartbeat and made my fingers tremble and I closed my eyes and relished the pure intoxication of it all.