Her by Harriet Lane

accumulate, an avid sort of silence caught in the tight coils of cord. Someone listening quite patiently while I said again and again, ‘Hello? Hello, who’s there?’ And then after a few seconds, the connection would be cut. ‘Who was that?’ my mother would call, and – unsure of why I was lying, but knowing a lie was necessary – I’d call back, ‘Wrong number.’
    Sometimes my mother must have taken these calls, though she never mentioned them to me. Standing in the hall, the receiver grasped like a duty, a punishment. ‘Hello? Who’s that? Is anyone there?’
    When my father eventually came home, with carrier bags full of Duty Free scent and cigarettes, and packs of Hershey’s Kisses for me, there would be a few days’ grace, and then I would start to catch hold of the edge of arguments, arguments taking place behind closed doors when I was meant to be asleep or out or doing my homework. Mostly I would hear my mother’s wild emotional indiscipline, but if I listened for long enough I would hear the sore, sour sound of my father.
    And then the house was put up for sale, and we moved to Jassop, and the phone calls stopped, for a while at least.
    ‘She kept her spinning wheel and her looms in the attic,’ I tell Charles, ‘and when he was at home he was always in the drawing room, on the piano, or the telephone – so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when they split up. It was a lovely house, though, the oldest bit of it was in the Domesday Book. Or at least, that’s what they told me.’
    As I say it, I remember stepping from the hot garden into the little porch, its pegs hung with mildewy macs, and then passing down into the thankful chill of the kitchen, the soft cold flagstones underfoot, the striped roller-towel on the range rail, the china sink capillaried with pale blue, the paper bags of sugar and flour leaning into each other on the pantry shelves. One particularly deep cupboard had mesh panels in the door: the meat safe, where not so long before game birds and joints of beef and lamb were stored.
    ‘We could go and have a look around one weekend,’ he suggests. ‘Book a hotel. See the marsh churches. What do you think?’
    ‘Might be fun,’ I say, but I don’t want to go back. I never have. This is as close as I want to get: the thick streaks and smears and beads of paint, bands of colour, the sky, the light. Nothing too specific. I remember long afternoons – always hot, always indolent with heat – spent in the garden at Jassop, making the snapdragons snap while the pansies (‘kitten faces’, my mother called them) trembled in the breeze, and I remember that feeling of waiting for something to happen. Something exciting or marvellous. I knew it was on its way. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I knew it was coming.
    My bedroom was under the eaves, with a low sloping ceiling. No door handle, just a wooden latch. Pale yellow walls, a blue coverlet on the bed. When I was little I’d made a family of clay owls which my mother had helped me to glaze and fire (five or six of them, in waistcoats and aprons and spectacles), and even as a teenager I liked to see them there on the windowsill, set out in order of size, looking out owlishly towards the sea.
    I wonder what happened to the owl family. Probably my mother has them still, in a shoebox at the back of a cupboard. The arrowheads of their sculpted feathers. The sharp little nibs of their beaks.
    ‘Let’s walk over to Hampstead for a coffee,’ Charles is saying, so I tidy up, putting some sketches in the plan chest, and as I do so I pause for a moment as the manila envelope slides into view. My hand goes out to it, and then I put the papers on top of it and close the drawer.
    We leave the studio, passing Casey – who runs an internet operation from a unit on the same floor, selling imported Japanese sports drinks and energy bars – in the dim concrete stairwell. The noise of our footsteps chases us down into the cold street.