I do not think of the envelope, nor the white-bordered Instamatic snaps it contains; inexpertly and pretentiously composed, speckled with the leaky bleached stars of accidental exposure. The blacks bleeding into the reds.
Emma
Ben’s father Dirk comes out to greet us, his mustard corduroy trousers a beacon in the dusk, his mouth opening and shutting as the headlights sweep over him and the naked lady in the hostas before coming to rest on the double garage. There’s a moment of silence when Ben switches off the engine, and then the baby wakes up and I reach out for the handle.
‘Emma, splendid, how was the traffic?’ he’s saying, striding towards me, his hands flapping out to seize my waist. I intercept them just in time, grabbing his fingers, glad I remembered. Here’s Christopher, shyly stumbling up behind me, Blue Bunny dangling by one ear. Dirk greets him rather perfunctorily, then turns with more enthusiasm to Ben, wanting to know about the sat-nav and the bypass.
Ben brandishes the car seat containing Dirk’s granddaughter. This is their second meeting; Dirk and Peggy came to see me in hospital, bringing yellow flowers. But Dirk has other things on his mind. ‘Yes, it’s new,’ he says, gesturing expansively at the silver Audi estate parked in its own special spotlight on the gravel, as if we’ve all been clustering around, clamouring questions. ‘Trade-in. John Brethwick made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Miles to the gallon, it makes sense, had it a fortnight, haven’t had to fill it up once.’
Dirk was in shipping insurance and claims to be retained, in some capacity, as an ad-hoc consultant. Secretly I find it hard to believe that his firm is a willing participant in this arrangement: I imagine the smoke-signals from the front desk on the days when he drops in to the huge redbrick HQ off Holborn, the PAs on high alert, the bigwigs suddenly remembering critical meetings on the fifth floor. Dirk buttonholing clerks by the water-cooler, passing on the benefit of his wisdom and experience. He’s a man of infinite butterfly interests: opinions on everything, though they vary from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, depending on whether he has been absorbing data from the Spectator or the Today programme or a copy of Peggy’s Daily Mail . For Dirk, the important thing is having an opinion. Its particular flavour matters less.
‘You’ll see we’ve had a new alarm system put in,’ he says, indicating a box on the wall under the eaves, but at this Cecily starts to twist and whimper in her harness so I say, ‘I think I’d better—’ and almost reluctantly he says of course, come on into the warm, Peggy’s getting tea ready, there’s still some Christmas cake left.
I wouldn’t mind feeding Cecily in the sitting room, just to get up his nose, but when I say she’s hungry Peggy tells me she has popped us in the Blue Bedroom, it’s all set up, I should find everything I need up there. So I put Cecily over my shoulder and go upstairs, along an acre of olive carpet illuminated by dim glazed wall sconces in the shape of scallops, and lie down with her on the bed, on the slippery periwinkle bedspread, because the chair by the window has no armrests.
While Cecily feeds, I work through the pile of Christmas round robins that have been left out for us (although the pond-water illumination cast by the squat little ceramic bedside lamp, with its pleated shade, does not make this easy). For all the wrong reasons I love these letters. I love the ludicrous spectacle of strangers’ lives artlessly set out for my delectation: the foreign holidays, the house extensions (‘we finally got rid of the builders!’), the silver-wedding celebrations and theatre trips to Stratford-upon-Avon. Cynthia and Derek are learning Portuguese! Kathy and Malcolm have bought a camper van! Berenice has moved to Wales!
And yet, beneath it all, it’s clear that a displacement is taking place. Peggy and Dirk’s
Emma
Ben’s father Dirk comes out to greet us, his mustard corduroy trousers a beacon in the dusk, his mouth opening and shutting as the headlights sweep over him and the naked lady in the hostas before coming to rest on the double garage. There’s a moment of silence when Ben switches off the engine, and then the baby wakes up and I reach out for the handle.
‘Emma, splendid, how was the traffic?’ he’s saying, striding towards me, his hands flapping out to seize my waist. I intercept them just in time, grabbing his fingers, glad I remembered. Here’s Christopher, shyly stumbling up behind me, Blue Bunny dangling by one ear. Dirk greets him rather perfunctorily, then turns with more enthusiasm to Ben, wanting to know about the sat-nav and the bypass.
Ben brandishes the car seat containing Dirk’s granddaughter. This is their second meeting; Dirk and Peggy came to see me in hospital, bringing yellow flowers. But Dirk has other things on his mind. ‘Yes, it’s new,’ he says, gesturing expansively at the silver Audi estate parked in its own special spotlight on the gravel, as if we’ve all been clustering around, clamouring questions. ‘Trade-in. John Brethwick made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Miles to the gallon, it makes sense, had it a fortnight, haven’t had to fill it up once.’
Dirk was in shipping insurance and claims to be retained, in some capacity, as an ad-hoc consultant. Secretly I find it hard to believe that his firm is a willing participant in this arrangement: I imagine the smoke-signals from the front desk on the days when he drops in to the huge redbrick HQ off Holborn, the PAs on high alert, the bigwigs suddenly remembering critical meetings on the fifth floor. Dirk buttonholing clerks by the water-cooler, passing on the benefit of his wisdom and experience. He’s a man of infinite butterfly interests: opinions on everything, though they vary from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, depending on whether he has been absorbing data from the Spectator or the Today programme or a copy of Peggy’s Daily Mail . For Dirk, the important thing is having an opinion. Its particular flavour matters less.
‘You’ll see we’ve had a new alarm system put in,’ he says, indicating a box on the wall under the eaves, but at this Cecily starts to twist and whimper in her harness so I say, ‘I think I’d better—’ and almost reluctantly he says of course, come on into the warm, Peggy’s getting tea ready, there’s still some Christmas cake left.
I wouldn’t mind feeding Cecily in the sitting room, just to get up his nose, but when I say she’s hungry Peggy tells me she has popped us in the Blue Bedroom, it’s all set up, I should find everything I need up there. So I put Cecily over my shoulder and go upstairs, along an acre of olive carpet illuminated by dim glazed wall sconces in the shape of scallops, and lie down with her on the bed, on the slippery periwinkle bedspread, because the chair by the window has no armrests.
While Cecily feeds, I work through the pile of Christmas round robins that have been left out for us (although the pond-water illumination cast by the squat little ceramic bedside lamp, with its pleated shade, does not make this easy). For all the wrong reasons I love these letters. I love the ludicrous spectacle of strangers’ lives artlessly set out for my delectation: the foreign holidays, the house extensions (‘we finally got rid of the builders!’), the silver-wedding celebrations and theatre trips to Stratford-upon-Avon. Cynthia and Derek are learning Portuguese! Kathy and Malcolm have bought a camper van! Berenice has moved to Wales!
And yet, beneath it all, it’s clear that a displacement is taking place. Peggy and Dirk’s
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