Alison Moore - The Lighthouse

Another thing which he knows always irritated Angela was the look on his face whenever she came home smelling of cigarette smoke. In the early days, he had not objected in the slightest when he thought that Angela had been smoking. He even liked the smell. But by the time they began trying for a baby, he did indeed mind when she came home smelling of cigarettes, when Angela — who claimed not to smoke and who would always mention a stinky staff room or some pub she had been to or a friend who had smoked in her car — tasted of smoke when he kissed her. He wished that she would at least suck mints before coming home to him. He noticed it more towards the end of their marriage. He supposed that she was unhappy and this was her crutch.

And their trying for a baby was a source of tension in itself. There were many pregnancies but each time she lost the child. She accused him, in each aftermath, of rushing her into another attempt, however much time had gone by. He reminded her of her age. ‘Time is running out,’ he said to her. She was thirty when they met but forty-four when she became pregnant for the final time, some months before they separated.

He turns onto one side and then the other, worrying about intruders hiding in the garden, behind the rose bushes, coming in through the French windows while he is asleep. He wonders how fast he could run. He is already regretting not having that bath. He can feel his muscles stiffening.

Just after noon, on the day after the storm, Ester lets herself into the private apartment. Despite Bernard’s warnings, Ester has left the door unlocked again. Sometimes Bernard discovers the unsecured apartment and gives her a lecture, a reminder. ‘It’s an open invitation,’ he says.

Inside, Ester finds that she has also left the lights on. This is another bad habit of hers, turning on the light when she enters a room and then forgetting to turn it off when she leaves so that sometimes the whole of Hellhaus is ablaze.

She has finished her work for the day. The rooms are as clean as they are going to be and she is not expecting any guests this afternoon.

In the bedroom, she sits down at the dressing table and looks in the mirror. She sees the little creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth where her make-up has gathered; her short-cut, home-bleached hair grown out, the shape gone and inches of dark roots showing. Her gold-effect necklace burrows into her shallow cleavage, and the denim bulge of her stomach rests on her spreading thighs like a warm cat comfortably settled in her lap.

She was impressive as a girl. She remembers the look on Bernard’s face the first time he laid eyes on her. She was twenty-one, with platinum blond hair in a pixie cut. She was slender and shapely, her figure flattered by the pink satin dress she was wearing for her engagement party. The dress was sleeveless and backless, the hemline just above the knee.

She was in her stilettos phase and had a collection of high heels in black and white and silver and pink and all sorts. She kept them in their boxes with Polaroids of the empty shoes stuck to the front. But when she met Bernard, she was wearing his mother’s slippers.

Ida had welcomed Ester into the family the moment Conrad brought her home. She called Ester her daughter-in-law long before Ester and Conrad became engaged. When Ester visited, she spent most of the time in Ida’s kitchen, helping her with the cooking. It was a standing joke that Ida saw more of Ester than Conrad did.

Being in Ida’s kitchen reminded Ester of cooking with Lotte, the au pair she’d had as a child while her mother was away from home, travelling for the toiletries company. Ester had been very fond of Lotte and some of her favourite memories were of being in the kitchen while Lotte was cooking, being given jobs to do such as peeling potatoes and greasing baking trays.

Ester was no cook really, but she did like being in Ida’s kitchen, being Ida’s assistant, and while they worked, they talked.

Ida told Ester about the off-the-rails boy she had dated before meeting the man she had married, Conrad and Bernard’s father, and Ester told Ida about a married man with whom she had been involved before Conrad. Ida told Ester how scared she had been when she first discovered she was pregnant with Bernard, when she was not yet married to his father, and Ester told Ida that she had been pregnant once, when she was with the married man, and that she had been very scared and had not in the end been able to go through with it.

‘Is that dreadful?’ she said to Ida who stood quietly stirring the gravy.

‘You were young,’ said Ida.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ester, ‘if I want children at all.’

‘You’re still young,’ said Ida, turning off the gas and emptying the saucepan into the gravy boat and carrying it through to the dining room where the men were waiting.

On the day of the engagement party, while Conrad was getting drunk in the living room, Ester was in the kitchen with Ida, icing buns with an apron on and her high heels off, a spare pair of Ida’s slippers on her feet, when the doorbell rang. A delivery of flowers was expected, arrangements of pink roses for the party. Ester, dusting off her icing-sugared hands, said, ‘I’ll get that.’

Walking towards the front door, she saw the figure of a man through the patterned glass, the sun behind him. She had never met Bernard, Conrad’s older brother, who did not live nearby and rarely visited, but when she opened the door she recognised the eyes which gazed at her, taking her in, and the mouth which smiled and licked its lips, and even something in the voice which said, ‘You must be Ester.’ She knew without needing to ask that this was Bernard, who moved towards her and then past her and stood in the hallway removing his coat and his shoes, while Ester stood holding on to the open door, the sun coming in.

She could have sworn that it happened for both of them at that same moment. When, much later, he said that it had not happened for him until after that, it was like her having heard a fire engine or an ambulance going by as he stood there on the doorstep, and Bernard claiming to have heard it perhaps hours later when he and she and everyone else were outside on the patio. It had happened for him, said Bernard, while he was looking at her calves, slim and sleek between the hem of her dress and the ankle straps of her stilettos.

Before the end of Bernard’s visit, Ester had taken up with him and broken off her engagement to Conrad. The first time Bernard came back to see her, they met at Ida’s house. Everyone, said Bernard, letting her in, was out for the day. As he no longer lived at home, and slept, when he was there, on a sofa bed in the living room, he suggested that they go into Conrad’s bedroom, but Ester did not want to. Bernard was less keen on using his parents’ bed but in the end he settled for that. Afterwards, while Bernard was in the shower, Ester stood looking through the things on Ida’s dressing table, admiring a hairbrush inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Hearing the front door slam, she dressed quickly and picked up her handbag, ready to go. But she was not sure what to do and stood for a while on this side of the bedroom door. Hearing nothing, she opened the door and went to the top of the stairs, and at that moment Bernard came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, and Conrad came up the stairs. She would not have minded a scene, but Conrad just looked at her and at Bernard and went without speaking into his room and that was unbearable.

Ester did meet Bernard at Ida’s house again, but she did not go in. Ester remembers Ida opening the front door, turning away to call for Bernard and then turning back and looking silently at Ester until Bernard appeared in the hallway and took Ester away. Ida did not say, ‘You’ve got a nerve coming here.’ She did not say, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ She did not say, ‘The sight of you makes me sick.’