saucer my mother has risen from her chair, whipping them (and the plate of biscuits and the little stack of napkins) off the coffee table, and bustling back to the kitchen, where I hear her carefully rinsing and then arranging the china in the dishwasher, in what is always a very particular formation.
‘Why don’t you go and put your things in your room, Frances?’ she calls gaily, over the roar of tap water.
I take my bag and climb the stairs. My parents live on the edge of a pretty village, in a comfortable three-bedder builtin the seventies: white-painted boards and Cambridge brick, pine panelling in the dining room, bubbled glass in the bathroom door. At the front, the view is of the village green, with its bus shelter and pink-washed pub and occasional uninspired games of cricket. At the back, you look out over the garden and fields of rape and cabbages, and the strange dwindling architecture of pylons processing off into the next county. It’s a very flat, uneventful landscape.
My mother has gussied up the room for me, as she always does, as if the gussying up will somehow distract me from the shot springs in the bed, which I’ve had since primary school. It’s like a little stage set, every painstaking detail suggesting gracious living.
The pair of scatter cushions arranged against the pillow. The guest soap, still in its wrapper, laid upon the flannel. Three padded satin coat hangers fanned out on top of the duvet. The stack of
Good Housekeepings
and
House & Gardens
on the bedside table, next to the tray of tea things – mini-kettle, sugar sachets, UHT thimbles – as if I’m being accommodated in the East Wing, as if the kitchen is half a mile away.
I drop my bag and sit down on the bed, and then I reach over and pick up a magazine and flick through it. It’s full of candle-making, beetroot recipes, charmingly mismatched blue-and-white crockery. There’s a special offer on glass cloches and brooms made in Sweden by the partially sighted. I don’t believe any of it. I put the magazine back with the others, taking care to line up the spines. I don’t want my mother to think I actually looked at them.
All my personality has long since gone from this room. The rosettes and posters and framed class photographs, the joke books and sets of C. S. Lewis and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the cushion cover I cross-stitched when I was nine: so many dust traps, all got rid of. The bottom drawer in the little chestcontains my A-level and degree certificates, my stamp collection and a shoebox of old snapshots, and that’s really all that is left of me in the house.
Here in my bedroom, the curtains in the little dormer windows were once yellow with a scarlet and orange rick-rack trim; now they’re toile de Jouy shepherds and ladies on swings, toes pointed and hat ribbons flying. When did one replace the other? I can’t remember. Was my permission, or even my inclination, sought? I am sure it was not.
There is a rattle from downstairs as my father opens the glazed front door and closes it behind him.
I spread my hands on the duvet cover, feeling the heat trapped in my palms by the polycotton, the light, uneven give of the springs. Then I stand up and unzip my bag and take out my toothpaste and toothbrush, my hairbrush and the Sunil Ranjan proof copy. Seeing it lying there on the bedside table makes me feel like a slightly different person; someone, possibly, whose opinions might just matter a little.
When I go downstairs, my mother is busy in the kitchen, and my father is circulating with a jug of water, charging the tumblers set out on the dining table. He puts down the jug to greet me and we kiss hello. I am filling him in on the highs and lows of my journey (‘Did you see the new B&Q they’ve built outside Tewford?’) when my mother – mouthing a tiny O of anxiety as she bears a Pyrex dish of mince and potatoes before her – enters, obliging us to separate. We both step back to the edges of the room so she can
‘Why don’t you go and put your things in your room, Frances?’ she calls gaily, over the roar of tap water.
I take my bag and climb the stairs. My parents live on the edge of a pretty village, in a comfortable three-bedder builtin the seventies: white-painted boards and Cambridge brick, pine panelling in the dining room, bubbled glass in the bathroom door. At the front, the view is of the village green, with its bus shelter and pink-washed pub and occasional uninspired games of cricket. At the back, you look out over the garden and fields of rape and cabbages, and the strange dwindling architecture of pylons processing off into the next county. It’s a very flat, uneventful landscape.
My mother has gussied up the room for me, as she always does, as if the gussying up will somehow distract me from the shot springs in the bed, which I’ve had since primary school. It’s like a little stage set, every painstaking detail suggesting gracious living.
The pair of scatter cushions arranged against the pillow. The guest soap, still in its wrapper, laid upon the flannel. Three padded satin coat hangers fanned out on top of the duvet. The stack of
Good Housekeepings
and
House & Gardens
on the bedside table, next to the tray of tea things – mini-kettle, sugar sachets, UHT thimbles – as if I’m being accommodated in the East Wing, as if the kitchen is half a mile away.
I drop my bag and sit down on the bed, and then I reach over and pick up a magazine and flick through it. It’s full of candle-making, beetroot recipes, charmingly mismatched blue-and-white crockery. There’s a special offer on glass cloches and brooms made in Sweden by the partially sighted. I don’t believe any of it. I put the magazine back with the others, taking care to line up the spines. I don’t want my mother to think I actually looked at them.
All my personality has long since gone from this room. The rosettes and posters and framed class photographs, the joke books and sets of C. S. Lewis and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the cushion cover I cross-stitched when I was nine: so many dust traps, all got rid of. The bottom drawer in the little chestcontains my A-level and degree certificates, my stamp collection and a shoebox of old snapshots, and that’s really all that is left of me in the house.
Here in my bedroom, the curtains in the little dormer windows were once yellow with a scarlet and orange rick-rack trim; now they’re toile de Jouy shepherds and ladies on swings, toes pointed and hat ribbons flying. When did one replace the other? I can’t remember. Was my permission, or even my inclination, sought? I am sure it was not.
There is a rattle from downstairs as my father opens the glazed front door and closes it behind him.
I spread my hands on the duvet cover, feeling the heat trapped in my palms by the polycotton, the light, uneven give of the springs. Then I stand up and unzip my bag and take out my toothpaste and toothbrush, my hairbrush and the Sunil Ranjan proof copy. Seeing it lying there on the bedside table makes me feel like a slightly different person; someone, possibly, whose opinions might just matter a little.
When I go downstairs, my mother is busy in the kitchen, and my father is circulating with a jug of water, charging the tumblers set out on the dining table. He puts down the jug to greet me and we kiss hello. I am filling him in on the highs and lows of my journey (‘Did you see the new B&Q they’ve built outside Tewford?’) when my mother – mouthing a tiny O of anxiety as she bears a Pyrex dish of mince and potatoes before her – enters, obliging us to separate. We both step back to the edges of the room so she can
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