More

Or;  Killing Two Birds With One Stone, or;  Beats Thinking of Something Else to Write.

Anyway, here are some more pieces of this thing I've been working on:

The day came at last, loud with wind. The west-facing windows, old and unsettled in their frames, shivered as it struck them. At the top of the house, Ruth woke beneath her duvet and listened a moment to the weather's long screed. Then, with an air of resolution, she swung herself out of bed.


In the bathroom she found her yesterday's trousers and jumper folded on top of the hamper, where she'd left them. Even as a child she had never been the sort simply to step out of clothes and abandon them, gaping, on the floor. These she shook out now and shrugged on. From the mirror, a middle-aged woman watched her with interest: a woman who needed a haircut but was not going to have one today. She ran a brush through the shapeless layers, the mistake of a few months earlier, found an Alice band in a basket, and regarded the effect critically. The middle-aged woman rewarded her with a look of exasperation, and Ruth felt as she'd done at five, trying to play beauty-shop with her mother.

Carrying her shoes, breathing as softly as she could, she padded down the stairs. Past the first-floor landing, where her grown son Michael slept in the dark spare room that had once been his own. Past the ground floor with its bow-windowed sitting room, the Morris chair still pushed close to the cold remains of a coal fire. In the basement, where the kitchen light glimmered at the end of the brief corridor, she paused, holding her breath now, at the studio’s half-open door.

This room exhaled a faint tang of oil paint. Ruth had always thought it a hollow smell, like the smell of a bell being struck. Along the room’s perimeter stood stacked canvases, large and small, four or five or six deep, just as Polly had left them five years ago, when she had laid down her work for good. Jars of ancient turpentine on the window-ledge still bristled with brushes. Clipped to a board on the mantel above the electric fire, a nude woman in charcoal turned her massive unfinished buttocks on the room.

In the far corner, swallowed in shadows, slept Polly, the grandmother of Ruth's husband Owen. She had come with the house and the marriage, long ago; today she was one hundred years old. Blind and petulant as a new kitten, she slept the fitful sleep of a child staving off nightmares. Many times in the night Ruth had to fling herself down all those stairs –why didn’t she put up a camp bed in the little corridor between kitchen and studio? – to answer the fretting of Polly’s bell, make her tea, sit with her soothingly till her unseeing eyes fluttered shut again. But now, in the early morning, Polly was fully asleep, her breaths falling evenly on the paint-scented air. Ruth stood in the doorway, listening. Then, to be safe, she eased the door shut, biting her lip.

She found Owen in the kitchen, muddling over the kettle. Hearing her step, he turned to her, exasperated. “It won’t hot up.”

She took the kettle from him and pressed the plug more firmly onto its prongs. “There. It just wasn’t connected all the way. Now try.”

He clicked the switch and stood waiting, like a child who has been promised that his toy will make a noise, now the new batteries are in. In a moment the kettle hissed to a boil.

“Well done, old thing,” said Owen. “Where would I be without your American ingenuity?”

“In a bind,” Ruth said jauntily, she hoped. After twenty-two years, she was bored with her American ingenuity. It made her, she felt, an exhaustingly useful houseguest.

She watched Owen fumbling with the tea, rattling cups into their saucers. His hands were an old man’s hands, wormy and transparent-skinned and, when he touched her, always chilly. Now, waiting for the tea to brew, he turned and stroked her cheek while she sliced bread for toast.

“You’re warm,” he told her.

“I was frozen in bed. You left me.”

“Sorry. Can’t sleep for anything. I read for a bit, then I was up for good.” He turned back to the tea.

The warm toast smell filled the kitchen with a mundane olfactory glow. Outside, the grey day pressed against the window. Ruth imagined how that basement window would look to a passerby, happening to glance down as he hastened along the street: a subterranean yellow-radiant rectangle, spilling something approximating cheer out into the turbulent cold.

Sipping her tea, she watched Owen strapping reflective bands round his trouser cuffs. Even in daylight, he was a cautious cyclist, full yellow lifejacket fastened over his greatcoat, white crash helmet mashing his fine thin tarnished hair.
“Going somewhere?” she asked needlessly.

“Only to Matins,” he answered as needlessly. “What have you got on this morning?”

“The usual,” she said, more bitterly than she’d meant to. “And then some.”

He straightened with some difficulty. “Nurse coming in today, I presume?”

“You'd better believe it,” she replied. "I've hung Gran's dress in my wardrobe, all pressed, and Bobbie can help me wrestle her into it. She can sit with her, too, while I do some last-minute --"

“Michael’s here to help you see to things.”

“True enough.”

“He seems awfully anxious to be useful.”

“He is useful,” said Ruth, meaning that she would have thrown herself down the stairs for Michael, if that had been required.

She watched Owen tramp away in his reflective gear. A moment later, overhead, the front door was blown open, hard, against the wall, then wrenched shut again with its customary wheeze. She saw his feet pass the window and stop as he unchained his bicycle. Then he was gone.

Finding a packet of Michael’s cigarettes on the kitchen counter, Ruth took one out and smoked it, inhaling hard, right down to the filter. It had been years since she’d last done anything like that; she’d given up her single vice, which signaled to the world that she was not that good a girl, as soon Michael was conceived.

But, "Have a drink and a smoke with me, Mum," he’d said last night when the dishes were washed, and so she had, there at the kitchen table beneath the pendant light. She’d felt guilty, almost: the rest of the house asleep, herself awake late with her hand on a bottle of Old Speckled Hen and a fag in a jam-jar lid leaking smoke in a lazy upward spiral that vanished in the lamplight, laughing a throaty laugh she’d forgotten she had, with a broad, hairy, blue-eyed man who happened to be her son.

. . .

Now she stubbed out her breakfast fag and flicked the end into Owen’s empty mug on the drain board. She emptied the tea, rinsed the pot, and made dark thick coffee in the French press for herself and Michael, whenever he might emerge. She needed the guts black coffee gave her, she thought, to bear her through the day. There were the cakes to pick up at the bakery: she’d send Michael to do that. There were the sandwiches to cut, the sausage rolls to heat. Owen’s sister Sophie would be round later with her eldest daughter and the daughter's girls to arrange the platters of fruit and vegetables. The nurse would be there to mind Polly while they did all the finishing-touch business.The house was clean, actually clean; they’d had a team of maids in last week, a great splurge, and today she could have the great-nieces dust the mantels and hoover the baseboards one last time. What time they’d be there she wasn’t sure. The man from the Telegraph was coming at three to interview Polly, the Artist at Her Centenary. That, Ruth thought grimly, would be a story worth reading.

Her shoes were still on the table where she’d set them, and she sat down and put them on. Drumming her fingers on the oilcloth, she ran over the list in her mind. What else? What else? Food, cleaning, gifts – not that there were many of those, really. What did you give to someone a hundred years old? What was left? Polly had never held with presents anyway, neither giving them nor liking to receive them.

"Oh, no,” she’d said so often in the early years of Ruth’s marriage to Owen, when first Ruth, and then Michael, had pressed gifts on her dutifully at birthdays and at Christmas. When Polly said that you shouldn’t have, she meant that you shouldn’t have; that you had did not oblige her to be grateful. “I keep telling you I don’t want things,” she would remark, setting aside the box of soaps or the vase of flowers or the crayoned drawing. She never said anything was lovely. Even the infant Michael’s feelings were not spared. “Look, you can make a man green if you like, but you can’t have his arms down past his feet.”


No, a party and admirers: that was enough for Polly. She liked holding court. And, Ruth thought, with a pang of pity, that was the cruelty of great old age. The friends who might have remembered that Polly was still alive were themselves not alive to pay her their respects. Her daughter was dead, her grandchildren old, her great-grandchildren grown and distant. That left only the gallery owners, the newspaper writers, and Ruth herself to circle round Polly, waiting for her to notice them and speak.