Fiona Mozley: Elmet

Becky, who never ran too far from me, slashed her tail against my shins as she hopped in front of my feet. I kept kicking her, accidentally, then stumbling on myself so as not to hurt her.

Vivien’s garden had a neatness about it but looked natural. At first sight the ground was uneven and the rose bushes were strangled at the roots by shallow weeds but I saw that there were no fallen petals or dried leaves. Those had been cleared away. The grass stopped suddenly at the patio, trimmed severely at the edges to keep a clean line, parallel to a set of French windows.

Daddy knocked and Vivien opened the door and stared at us. She was tall like Daddy, but slim. Her hair was a thick russet and her skin so pale that you could almost see the blood behind it, the redness at her cheeks and the blueness at her eyes. It was honest skin. It was the kind of skin that could not hide a mark or a blemish or a sickness that lay within. She looked tired, either a tiredness from the early morning or a tiredness from a long life. She was perhaps forty, but seemed both older and younger, with irises that were both a bright green and a dull yellow, and an uncertain stoop that you see in both old ladies and adolescent girls. In the moment she stared at us, she inhaled deeply and exhaled quickly, as if she were conjuring a beginning or marking an ending.

‘I didn’t expect you this early,’ she said to Daddy, although her eyes still jumped between my sister and me. She turned to him now and smiled, and pulled the door wider to see us all better, and then to let us in.

Cathy took the invitation and stepped over the threshold, standing in front of the woman as she placed a long hand on each of Cathy’s upper arms.

‘You must be Catherine,’ she said. ‘I met you when you were a toddler and your brother was a baby.’

Vivien ushered Cathy through into the house and I took the step up into the hall.

She looked at me and took me as she had taken Cathy, firmly and with both hands. ‘Daniel. Come in.’

The sitting room was light despite the heavy green plants propped up on the windowsills. The French windows faced south-east towards the morning sun, and light poured in over the sharply edged papers that had been placed carefully on specific surfaces. There was a deep sofa covered by worn blue velvet, with two large sitting cushions. They dipped to meet each other in the middle but were still quite plump at their outer edges. There was a blanket on one of the arms with a scene stitched together with red and white wool but obscured by the folds. There was a carpet atop a carpet, one grey and fitted to the size and shape of the room, and one a set rectangle with tassels on the two shorter edges and a pattern of lines and angles that I would have sat down on and traced my fingers over were I younger or alone. There was a coffee table in the centre of the room and a round upright table by the French windows with a white cotton cloth and a tucked-in chair. There was a plate and a cup of tea or coffee on this table, and I supposed Vivien had eaten her breakfast there. There was a fireplace with a smoke-screen in front of it, and although there was a fire already made up, nothing had yet been lit. Fire tools were in a bucket on the hearth. Tongs. A poker. A shovel. A coarse brush. And triangles of compacted newspaper were stored in a small open-topped wicker chest, safely stowed in a corner away from the fireplace. There were some ornaments on the mantel, and I remember particularly a small clock with Roman numbers, whose face was set into a roughly hewn piece of limestone.

Daddy and Vivien came through into the sitting room to join Cathy and me. He had taken off his jacket and had his hands in his trouser pockets while she had hers crossed over her body with each hand on the opposite shoulder.

They were standing close to one another as if they were old friends but without the years of separation. There was the comfort of continuance between them. Yes, she was standing at his side but slightly in front, so that his arm could have been partially around her. I could not quite see but there might have been contact.

He opened his mouth. He looked particularly handsome today, within my own conception of what it was to be handsome, which I suppose came only from the image of my father.

‘Vivien were a friend of your mother’s,’ said Daddy again, seriously. ‘She’s going to teach you things what I can’t. She’s good at things what I aren’t. You’ll be spending your mornings with her.’

Cathy and I did not mind taking orders from Daddy. Sometimes we were more like an army than a family and he was not the type of leader to make you do anything for nothing.

Vivien looked nervous. She only seemed half on board, half off board. As she looked between us, weakly, her pink lips became whiter and she pulled them into a smile.

Daddy looked better pleased with his plan. He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s get going then. I’ll be off for the next few hours. You can begin today.’

He turned and left the room. I heard a rustle in the hall as he picked his still-warm jacket off the coat stand and put it on. The door clicked shut after him.

Cathy’s expression was sour and she eyed Vivien suspiciously. Vivien loosened her grip on her shoulders and walked over to the small round table by the windows, the one with the tea and cake crumbs. She untucked the chair and sat down. She looked at both of us, but still mainly at Cathy.

‘I want to make these lessons, you know, fun for you both.’

I thought for a moment that she had said the wrong thing. Cathy stared. She did not raise her eyebrows or roll her eyes. She did not even purse her lips. She just stared. She felt as if she had been patronised. Slighted. I knew this because I knew my sister well, better than anyone, even Daddy, though he thought they were so alike in their hearts.

Vivien looked at Cathy seriously, unable to decipher the sudden silence.

But Cathy took Daddy deadly seriously in his attempts to train us against the world. She found a kind of solace in his tasks. She wanted to be every inch of him but believed what he said about how different she was, about how she had to be good at different things, how she had to find a different way of surviving. If Daddy thought Vivien’s lessons were important then she would commit herself to them, at least initially.

So Cathy stopped staring and came back to life, throwing herself into the moment.

‘What do we need to do, then?’ Cathy asked.

Vivien ventured a smile.

That evening Cathy and I went out into the clearing we had lived in before Daddy had built the house. It was still well-trodden but the earth was harder than it had been during the summer and the branches of the overhanging trees were thin tendrils. We sat on the cold stumps of a couple of trees.

‘I can’t think of owt worse than growing up to be her,’ Cathy said. She was talking about Vivien.

‘I thought she was okay,’ I replied. ‘She’s not very like us but I don’t know if that matters.’

Cathy didn’t answer me. She seemed sad, restless, and she cradled her mug of warm tea and looked into the liquid.

We had come outside because Daddy was in a dark mood and had shut himself up in his room alone. He had been light and brisk all day but as the sun began to set just before five o’clock he had taken a turn for the worse and slipped out of the kitchen quietly. We had not noticed right away and kept on with making the dinner. It was only when we had put the scrubbed potatoes inside the oven to bake and turned to sit down that we noticed he had gone. Cathy went out into the hall to see if he wanted any beer or cider to drink before the dinner was ready but found that the door of his room was locked shut without any answer from within. She had come back and when the food was ready we had eaten alone, leaving a plate for him covered on the hob. He stayed locked away long after we had finished, and I suggested that we go outside.