Sorrow and Bliss(13)

‘I can go out.’

Patrick said it was fine, he could just go and find another one, then looked quickly in either direction as though my uncle was about to appear from one of them. I took a half-step to the side and he rushed in.

For a minute or two, he spoke to his father, in monosyllables. I waited outside the door until I heard him say goodbye. He was standing next to the phone table, staring blankly at a painting above it of a lion attacking a horse. A moment passed before he noticed me, apologising for taking so long when he did. I thought he would leave then but he just stood there while I walked back to the sofa and sat down on the covers, crossed-legged, hugging a cushion in front of my chest and silently wishing for him to go so I could lie down again. Patrick stayed where he was. Because I could not think of another question I said, ‘How is school?’

‘Good.’ He turned around, paused, then said, ‘Sorry you’re sick.’

I shrugged and pulled a thread out of the cushion zip. Although it was his third year with us, I could not remember talking to Patrick individually about something other than what time it was or where to put the plates he had brought down to the kitchen. But after another moment of him not leaving, I said, ‘You must miss your dad.’

He smiled and nodded in a way that made it clear he didn’t.

‘Do you miss your mum?’ As soon as I said it, his face changed, not towards an emotion I could name, more the absence of any. He moved over to the window, stood with his back turned and his hands by his sides, not speaking for such a long time that when he eventually said yeah it felt like it wasn’t in reference to anything. His shoulders rose and fell with a heavy breath and I felt guilty that I had never considered how lonely he must be as the only unrelated person in the house, that having Christmas with someone else’s family every year was less likely his preference than a source of shame.

I shifted a bit and said, ‘What was she like?’

He stayed at the window. ‘She was really nice.’

‘Do you remember specific things about her? If you were seven.’

‘Not really.’

I pulled another thread out of the cushion. ‘That’s sad.’

Patrick finally turned around and said, quietly, that the only thing he did remember, which wasn’t from a photo, was one time in the kitchen of the house they lived in before she died, he asked for an apple and as she was handing it to him she said do you need me to start it for you?

‘I don’t know why.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Five or something.’

I said, ‘You probably didn’t have front teeth.’

There isn’t a name for the emotion that registered on his face then. It was all of them. Patrick left after that.

*

There was a café, a minute or two from the Executive Home, which I used to go to every morning. The barista was very young and looked like a non-specific famous person. One day I made a joke about it as he pressed the lid onto my coffee. He said something disappointingly flirtatious in response and by the end of the week I had entered into a mandatory banter relationship with him. It quickly became onerous and I started going to a café that was further away, where the coffee was less good and where I did not have to talk.

*

Alone again, I got off the sofa and tried to find something to read. There was only a Radio Times and a fully revised and updated edition of The Complete Whippet on the coffee table, and some sheet music on my aunt’s writing desk.

I already knew that she had got into the Royal College of Music ‘at the tender age of sixteen’ because, according to my mother, she would have whispered it over my crib. As such, it had never struck me as extraordinary. I had never thought about how she had managed it with a depressed seaside mother and a pointless father and no money. And, I realised, picking the music up and turning through the pages, astonished by the concentration of notes, that I had no memory of ever hearing her play. The grand piano in the formal living room I only thought of as something not to put drinks or anything else wet on.

While I was standing there, the door opened half way and Winsome edged in with a tray. She was wearing an apron, wet with dishwater. I put the music down and apologised but as soon as she recognised what I had been holding, she looked delighted. I told her I had never seen such complicated music. She said it was just a bit of old Bach but seemed reluctant to turn the conversation to the topic of the tray and what was on it, only doing so once it became clear that I did not have anything else to say.

I went back to the sofa and sat down. It was, in her description, a little bit of leftovers but once she had set the tray in my lap, I saw it was an entire Christmas lunch in miniature, arranged on an entrée plate, a linen napkin in a silver ring beside it, and a crystal glass of fizzy grape juice. My eyes filled with tears. Immediately, Winsome said I was under no obligation to eat it if I didn’t feel like it. Since the summer, the sight of food had been unbearable to me but it was not why I could only stare at it. It was the care in my aunt’s arrangement, the still-life beauty of it and, as I think about it now, the sense of safety that my brain construed from the child-sized portions.

My aunt said alright, well – perhaps she’d pop back later – and went to go.

As she got to the door, I heard myself say, ‘Stay.’

Winsome wasn’t my mother, but she was maternal – expressly not my mother – and I didn’t want her to leave. She asked if there was something else I needed.