Arlington Park Read online

  “The nights that I am here,” Betty said, in her excellent, high-pitched, accented English that was like a fine thread which unspooled continuously from her mouth, “it is perfectly okay for you to leave the children and go out. And please, I will not accept any payment. It is a pleasure for me to spend time with these lovely children. It is okay for you?”

  Martin and Solly found themselves facing each other in a restaurant, slightly startled, as though they had hurtled down to their table from a great height.

  “Extraordinary,” Martin said.

  “Isn’t it?” said Solly.

  “I went upstairs to turn their light out,” Martin said, “and there was Betty, sitting on the bed reading them a story.”

  “Amazing,” said Solly.

  “And I said, Come on, that’s enough, let Betty go downstairs, it’s time to go to sleep. And Betty says”—Martin was beside himself with excitement—“Betty says, Oh, please, can we just read a few more pages?”

  Solly related this tale to several of her friends. She thought she had forgotten some important aspect of it. It always sounded a little as though she and Martin were auditioning Betty for the role of the children’s new mother.

  She never went into her spare room now that Betty was there, but one afternoon, passing the door, she heard the children in there. Immediately she entered, and found them sprawled on the bed watching television while Betty sat cross-legged on the floor doing her coursework from the language centre. Little foil chocolate wrappers lay discarded everywhere—forty wrappers at least—and the television was spewing out demented rubbish like a box of madness. William had chocolate around his mouth. He was lying on his back with his head hanging over the edge of the bed so that he was watching it upside down. Dora had her legs propped up against the wall and her knickers were showing. Joseph was bouncing on the bed. The bodies of the other two jolted imperviously up and down when he jumped.

  Solly was outraged. Suddenly it was all—well, outrageous. Minutes earlier she had been sitting in a chair in the kitchen, her pregnant belly queasily tight, like a great sagging balloon filled to bursting with water. She had heard the silence in the house and guessed that the children had been magnetised by Betty, by her dense, neat form emitting its vigorous waves of attraction. And so she had chosen to believe in something miraculous: to find repose, for a while, with Martin away until Thursday and her flagging body fit to burst, in the concept of intervention. That was the problem, the outrage. She had given in to the temptation of believing something might help.

  “In Betty’s culture,” she explained to her friends, “children are dealt with by means of a non-stop diet of sweets and television. Which is all very well at the time, until someone else has to pick up the pieces.”

  After six weeks Betty announced that she was returning to Taiwan. Solly was devastated, in a way. She still believed in her religion of Betty—she couldn’t conceive of believing in anyone else.

  “What about Gustave?” she asked.

  Betty nodded. “He is very sad,” she said.

  In her last week she reprogrammed the Kerr-Leighs’ computer and taught them how to set the video recorder. She entered the children’s birthdays into Martin’s mobile phone, so that it would set off an alarm when the time came.

  Shortly after she had gone, Gustave phoned. Qi Shu had left two textbooks at the house which he had promised to collect and return to the language centre.

  “Who?” said Solly.

  There was a silence.

  “Oh, sorry, I forget,” Gustave said. “You call her Betty.”

  “Was that not her name?” Solly asked.

  “But of course not,” Gustave said sombrely.

  Aghast, Solly said, “Why did she ask us to call her Betty?”

  “She said people here did not remember her Chinese name,” Gustave explained. “It was easier for her to use an English name.”

  After Betty came Katzmi, a whey-faced, doleful Japanese girl with English so primitive that Solly continually found herself at the edge, at the very limit of her own civilised self, vacillating there as though on the perimeter of a vast darkness. Now that she could no longer communicate, she became aware of how much of her lay shrouded in this inarticulable darkness. Yet she could not navigate it either. It was like a big black prairie she saw from her lit porch. She became a kind of animal, pantomiming enquiries and requests, acting out her own consciousness with bodily heaves and grimaces. Her body, seven months pregnant, spoke for itself, in any case. She was under strain, and Katzmi was too. Blindly, dimly, their natures touched. The contact was like a fine nib guided crazily with fingers encased in concrete. At night she sometimes heard Katzmi crying in her room.

  “You?” Solly said the next morning, pointing at Katzmi. “Crying?” She trailed her fingers down her own red-veined cheeks.

  Katzmi nodded and looked at her sympathetically.

  For the children Katzmi’s presence was like the presence of a raw wound in which their worst selves multiplied. It was as though she reminded them that being normal was something they’d only recently heard about and could easily forget. Children needed to be surrounded by confident people, Solly decided. They were like little flames that caught hold of anything unfixed, anything carelessly disposed, and burned it up.

  “Eighty pounds a week, don’t forget,” said Martin.

  Gone were the evenings in restaurants; the Kerr-Leighs’ spare room was no longer riding high. Solly didn’t want to go to restaurants, in any case. She roamed the rooms of her house like a big bear in a small pen. At dinner the children fought and spat out their food, and Dora looked more crosseyed than usual. Once, Joseph swiped at Dora with his fork and made a little sickle-shaped cut on her cheek that bled. Another time she spilled her Ribena down her front so that it looked like a great bloodstain across her chest, and Solly was too tired and dispirited to do anything about it. Katzmi sat like a graven image in a church, and when Martin was in Reading, Solly found that she inhabited some of Katzmi’s impassivity, so that they sat there like two forlorn abbesses in a rioting refectory. William had a gob of glittering mucus on his upper lip that stayed there for two weeks as the repellent testimony to his robustness.

  “I’m sorry,” Solly said to Katzmi. They were doing the washing up. Katzmi was drying a saucepan with agonising slowness and care. Solly splayed her wet hands penitently across her chest. “I’m SORRY.”

  Sometimes Katzmi’s impenetrability appeared to Solly as a country she had never visited and would never now visit. At other times it seemed to extend a sort of dark invitation to her, like a well into which she yearned to cast her bloated form. Once or twice, when Katzmi was at the language centre, Solly had put her head around the spare room door and was overpowered by its neutrality. There was nothing to show that Katzmi lived there at all, except for a teddy bear placed on the neatly plumped-up pillows, where a mother, or someone imitating one, might have placed it.

  One night Katzmi emerged from her room and tried to engage Martin and Solly in conversation. She made futile sounds and gesticulated and laughed pitiably at herself.

  The next day someone from the language centre called and said that Katzmi had decided to go and live with another family.

  “Is she going back to Japan?” Solly asked.

  “No, it’s a local family,” the woman said.

  “A family here? In Arlington Park?”

  “They’re a local family,” the woman said.

  Katzmi left. Shortly afterwards, when Solly was eight months pregnant, Paola arrived.

  Solly had felt before the way everything altered just before a child was born. It was how she sometimes thought it might be to approach death. Everything grew very slightly remote: the fit of life loosened, as though it were a skin preparing itself to be shed. And although when the baby came it would restart it all with its unstoppable vegetable growth, there was a layer of Solly that was always irretrievably lost. She was depleted, of some aspect of experience, of histor
y: it was torn from her, like the wrapping paper from a present. Generally she believed that this was what she had been born for. She was grateful that she had been able to put herself to such prolific use. And the children gave so much back to you, of course. She was like a sack stuffed with their love and acknowledgement, lumpy on the outside but full, heavy with interior knowledge. It was just that sometimes she tried to think about the past and couldn’t. She couldn’t locate a continuous sense of herself. It seemed to lie all around her in pieces, like the casings of Dora’s Russian doll when all the babies were out.

  Martin, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have changed at all over the years. He had only weathered a little, like a monument. The more formless and dissipated Solly became, the more astonished she was by his lean, untouched masculinity, his body that had never been plundered, the line that seemed to run unbroken from his toes to the top of his head. He was so—flat. The children were flat too. She realised that Martin was continuous with his child self and she envied him. Life seemed to stand in them all like a standing jet of water in the middle of a fountain. She couldn’t imagine what it was like. In the past few years Martin had developed little breasts. You could only see them when he took his shirt off. At night, getting undressed in their room, he would walk around shyly, like a teenaged girl. She thought it must be quite pleasant for him, after all this time, to have developed the breasts of a teenaged girl. It was a sort of consolation prize for all he’d missed out on, though she didn’t suppose he saw it like that. If he’d ever envied her her woman’s body he probably didn’t now. He was loyal to it, that was all. For Martin, her body was like a village that over time had sprawled and grown until it became a bustling centre, cut through with new roads and modern developments, some of them unsightly. It had changed, but it was where he lived.

  She was in the garden when Paola arrived, and it might have been the fact that she had half forgotten she was coming, or just the shrill noise of the doorbell piercing the grey folds of the March morning, or the delayed way in which incidents penetrated the great pause of pregnancy and caused her heart to quiver in the jellied depths of her body; whichever it was, it so happened that the moment of Paola’s arrival was the moment Solly was besieged, out of the blue, by a crisis of the flesh.

  She was out there with Joseph: the other children were at school. He was riding his plastic tricycle. Solly, dressed in tracksuit bottoms, was standing on the wet rectangle of lawn in one of those null states she often entered in the presence of the children, when she forgot that she existed, or at least forgot to act as though she did. Joseph’s tricycle wouldn’t go. He was shunting it an inch at a time over the lumpy grass. Solly stared at the brown fence and the brown trunk of the tree and the brown earth of the flowerbeds. In the deadening grey light the yellow plastic of Joseph’s tricycle possessed an almost intolerable reality. It seemed vaguely to Solly to be the colour of her life, of midweek mornings spent at home with children. Time extended around her like a grey ocean, moving imperceptibly in its depths. She could not distinguish her own body: it was part of the grey ocean, on which only the shred of her soul floated, swaying this way and that.

  Then she noticed, in the far corner of the garden beneath the tree, a little clump of primroses. She walked slowly across the grass and stood over them. They were so delicate, so pretty—she towered over them like some dumb, shaggy creature that has just issued from its cave, examining the beautiful intricacy of life. Their petals were beaded with rain. She looked at them, dimly remembering the line of a song.

  The flowers all wet with rain.

  What was that song? What was it? She sang the line to herself.

  The flowers all wet with rain.

  The flowers all wet with rain.

  Out of a deep cavern of memory it came. It was a song by Van Morrison—someone she knew used to play it on a guitar. Then, like a little fork of lightning, her recollection lit its own instantaneous path down the twisted ways into the cavern of memory. She remembered a boy, a boyfriend she had for a while who played that song on his guitar. She was eighteen or nineteen—she remembered wearing jeans so threadbare her slender knees showed through, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She sat cross-legged on a rug on the floor, twisting in her fingers a string of beads she wore around her neck. She remembered a lamplit room, and the music, and the taut, ravenous feeling of her young body. How strange that she should have forgotten it! How strange that it should have been there all along, this memory, alive and intact but buried, hidden, like the child in her belly was hidden!

  It was then, just as Solly brought forth this naked recollection, expelled it into the light, that Paola rang the doorbell; and the sound flew like an arrow across the garden and pierced its flesh and a jet of hot sensation came flooding out. Solly stood as it passed over her, the overpowering memory of youth, the release of her eighteen-year-old self, all the imprisoned reality of Van Morrison and her minstrel boyfriend and flowers that trembled with beads of rain. It was so beautiful! It was so beautiful and yet so lost, so utterly lost and unavailing!

  The doorbell rang again.

  “Mummy!” Joseph shouted crossly, pointing towards the house.

  With shaking legs, Solly went lumbering inside and down the passage and opened the front door. A woman stood there with a large suitcase.

  “Solly Curly?” she said.

  “Kerr-Leigh,” Solly automatically amended.

  It had required a certain bravado, all those years before, to insist that her name be hyphenated with Martin’s rather than replaced by it. That was what she thought marriage should be: the state of hyphenation. Yet most of the people they knew pronounced it as the woman had just done, as one word with the emphasis on the first syllable. That syllable was Martin’s: it seemed a particularly insidious form of discrimination.

  “Paola Rocco,” the woman said in a firm, businesslike tone. She rolled the r expertly.

  “Oh!” said Solly.

  Paola extended a slim brown hand across the threshold and Solly took it. She was still in her dream of Van Morrison, and the feeling of Paola’s hand took her by surprise. It was as though her, Solly’s, flesh, the thick hide of her accustomed self, had been peeled back and a softer, more receptive surface revealed. It felt like Paola’s hand had spoken to her. The sensation of a warm brown hand, a stranger’s hand, passed into Solly as if through an open vein. The guttering image of the girl in the threadbare jeans flared into life again.

  “Did you forget me?” Paola then said, with a little crooked smile and a penetrating sideways glance.

  “Absolutely not,” Solly said emphatically, standing back to let Paola in.

  When Paola pulled her suitcase into the hall, Solly was surprised to remember that she had to press her enormous body right against the wall if Paola was to get it past.

  “She’s Italian,” she said to Martin on the telephone.

  Martin was in Reading.

  “Right-o,” he said, as though preparing for the Italians was one of the many ordinary things he could accomplish in a day.

  “It’s just that for some reason I thought she would be Spanish. Did you think that?”

  “To be honest,” Martin said, “I forgot she was coming.”

  Solly felt more than usually chagrined by this remark. Whenever there was a baby coming, Martin started forgetting things. She felt that he did it to lower her expectations of him.

  “She’s very stylish,” she said.

  “Is she?”

  “Very.”

  “Well, she won’t last long in our house, then,” Martin said.

  Solly was outraged. “Why do you say that?”

  “All I’m saying,” Martin said, “is that it’s not the sort of place you could imagine a stylish person would want to spend much time.”

  “What a thing to say about your own family!”

  “It’s true,” said Martin stubbornly. “Look, I’m not saying it’s your fault. It goes with the territory, that’s all. Childre
n and style don’t mix. There’s all their stuff, for a start. How can you be stylish when you’re always sitting down on pieces of Lego, or stepping in some half-eaten thing they’ve left on the floor, or having to watch videos about weird creatures with television sets in their stomachs? And then you pull up next to some girl in a sports car at the traffic lights and realise that you’ve still got one of their jingly tapes playing—”

  Solly was silent.

  “The other day,” Martin continued, “I opened my briefcase in a meeting and pulled out one of Dora’s pink plastic ponies—you know, the one with the long, sparkly blue hair. That was not particularly stylish. You’re the same,” he stated when Solly still did not speak. “You’re always saying that there’s no point in wearing nice clothes because they just get ruined. You say you don’t have time to wash your hair or put on make-up. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the way it is. That’s all I’m saying.”

  On her first evening Paola asked if she could take a bath. A while later, Solly became aware of a smell—a beautiful, exotic smell—stealing into the kitchen and intertwining itself with the brutal aromas of the children’s supper. She went out and stood at the bottom of the stairs. The smell filled the hall: it seemed to stand in an airy column of lavender and pink. Solly breathed it in, mesmerised. It was the smell of flowers, of a garden at dusk. It was the smell of flowers all wet with rain. The children joined her at the bottom of the stairs and like her lifted their faces upwards.

  “What’s that?” said William.

  “It’s perfume,” said Dora.

  “It’s bath oil,” said Solly.

  Alarmed, William turned on his heel and returned to the kitchen.