A Simple Life

There was an uncomfortable pressure weighing on her, and the sense of it made the colours of the day seem sickly and caused the clean resinous scent of the air to scrape in the back of her throat. Dinah felt that the gap between the capable laughing wife and mother she pretended to be and the real woman who crept within herself was growing wider and wider.

Only Matt sensed it, and she could barely talk to Matt at all.

She checked her watch again. Still a few minutes before time, but she needed to get out of the Jeep. She felt shut in, panicked by claustrophobia, fearful of the two women who slid uncontrollably apart beneath her skin.

She scrambled her belongings together and stepped out into the cool air. She dropped her purse and bent down to retrieve it, and as she straightened up again dizziness assaulted her.

Forcing herself to breathe evenly Dinah walked up the shallow steps to the door of the building. It was a new low-rise, with glass curtain-walls reflecting the whitish sky. Two men came out of the doors as she tried to go in and they glanced curiously at her as she edged past them.

The building was multi-occupied, there was a long list of tenants in the small lobby. Dinah searched for the consultant’s name, reading the list twice before she located it.

It was a corner office on the second floor. In the little anteroom there were two chairs and a table with neatly arranged business magazines.

‘Jenny shouldn’t be more than a minute or two,’ the consultant’s secretary smiled. Dinah opened her briefcase and stared at the typed résumé in her lap. Who was this woman? Was this who she had once been, defined and held in place by these qualifications and this much work done?

She realised that she was looking past the sheets of paper at her own knees. They made bony protuberances under the matt black stuff of her leggings. Solid enough. Yet she was afraid to touch them in case her fingers met emptiness. The fear of it ballooned in her chest like nausea.

Dinah’s head jerked up again and she focused on the view from the window. The buildings in the block opposite. A sugar maple, fire-tinted leaves. Back on Kendrick Dee Kerrigan would be laying out after-school bread and cookies in her kitchen. Nancy would be lifting her little girls out of the back of the station wagon, wondering as she did so if it was too early to have a glass of wine. Not knowing that Dinah was out she might well call over to see if she wanted to join her.

Normal things.

Were they normal, or did they seem strange to her only because of her distance from them?

Dinah straightened her legs. Her feet looked odd, disjointed.

Am I going mad?

‘Hi. I’m Jenny Abraham.’

The consultant had emerged from her office, was holding the door open for Dinah. They shook hands and Dinah obediently followed her. She sat down in the chair facing the desk, fanning out the paper evidence of herself before handing it over for scrutiny.

‘Thanks. That’s all very professional-looking. I’ll check through it in a moment, but we should talk a little first. It helps if I can get a kind of a feel for the person you are.’

Ms Abraham smiled encouragingly. They began to talk about the kind of work Dinah might do. Dinah knew that her body language was all wrong, but still she could not make herself unlock her knees and arms. She doubted that there was much in advertising outside New York or Boston, and even if there were there would surely be plenty of home-grown talent. Who would want a precarious Englishwoman? She wondered vaguely if she could teach. Almost everyone in Franklin seemed to be some kind of a teacher.

‘Good. That’s very interesting.’ Jenny Abraham managed to purse her lips and shake her head at the same time. She was writing busily in the spaces on a long form. The little stabs of her pen seemed sharp enough to puncture Dinah’s skin. There was a big coloured Peanuts poster on the wall behind the woman’s desk.

This was a bad mistake, Dinah was already thinking. Why had she let Ed Parkes bully her into it?

‘Let’s talk a little bit about the real you, Dinah.’

Ms Abraham leaned back in her swivel-chair and steepled her fingers.

‘Tell me, what are you proudest of, amongst all your achievements?’

Dinah started to talk too quickly, to fend the woman off. The words came out jumbled up. She said something about a campaign for a children’s charity she had once worked on and then contradicted herself, mentioning her boys, her family.

‘And most ashamed of?’

No.

I should have heard that before she said it. I should have guessed it was coming and forestalled her.

Who is she, to sit in her big chair with a smile and eyes like glass chips and ask me about shame? It was only a job I wanted. Some little occupation to divert my mind. Perhaps make me feel fixed here like Matt, even Jack and Merlin, instead of skidding over some huge inhospitable polished surface with no landmark, no harbour.

Only there is no diversion. How could I have imagined there would be? I have to get away from here first. Then I can think.

Dinah made an answering smile, just by stretching her stiff lips. She leaned forward and took her papers off the woman’s desk, squared them neatly by tapping the edges and slid them back into her briefcase.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve been wasting your time. I don’t really need a job. I’ve just realised.’

Somehow, she was standing up. Ms Abraham’s face showed a real expression, surprise. Dinah gathered her belongings awkwardly in her arms. Anger carried her out of the room and past the secretary in her cubicle, and back down in the elevator to the lobby. The Cherokee was where she had parked it, across the street.

She was driving, unseeingly following the route that led across town, before the fortifying anger drained away. It left her weak and disorientated so that she blinked through the windscreen at the white clapboarding of the Franklin Hotel on the south side of the green, and the line of cars waiting to turn at the lights. The driver of the station-wagon behind her hooted, and Dinah slid the Jeep into a parking space. She was shaking now.

Surging out of the dark place that she kept shuttered all her waking hours came a black wave of pain.

What was she ashamed of? That was what the woman had asked her. Not the woman’s fault, of course. Just a crappy pop personality-test question to make everyone think they were getting a slice of a real person in the answer.

Dinah’s hands gripped the steering wheel until the bones of her knuckles showed their reddened cleft. Shame and guilt were her constant companions. Sometimes they hid their faces, dissembling as craftily as she did herself, but still they were always with her.

She didn’t see the fake-rustic Franklin Inn sign swinging in front of her eyes. Instead Dinah was thinking of home, picturing the rain-smeared streets of a small town in Norfolk. She had never even been there, although to hear its name or see it written made her catch her breath.

I have to go home, she said aloud, knowing that she must look like a madwoman mouthing in the sanctuary of her car. I have to go back home and start searching.

Matthew sat at the end of the big kitchen table with some papers spread out in front of him. The boys were in bed and the house was quiet except for Ape snoring and twitching in his basket under the window.

Matt liked this time of the evening. The day trailed in a wake behind him and there were still hours beckoning, subterranean chambers below the chipped surface of the working day, before he need think of bed. Matthew never slept before the small hours. There was too much else to do, to think about, to waste time on sleep. Dinah was different, always had been. She needed eight hours and firmly believed, like her mother, that one hour before midnight was worth two after.

Matthew was reading columns of figures, following a pattern through them that was as vivid to him as a picture. He didn’t hear Dinah come in, but he looked up when she sat down in the chair opposite him. She was wearing her bathrobe, splashy red print on a white background.

‘Hi.’ He had been drinking a glass of wine, a Californian Cabernet recommended by Todd Pinkham. ‘Want some of this?’

Dinah shook her head.

Resignedly Matt took off his reading glasses. ‘Tell me about your day. What did happen with the job woman?’

He had asked the question earlier and she had turned it aside, pressing her lips into a thin suffering line as she did so.

‘Nothing happened. I just decided it was a bad idea.’

‘Okay, so don’t talk about it.’

Irritated, although he had resolved that he would not be, Matt replaced his glasses and began reading again. He wanted to slip away from Dinah and the difficulty that she had become, and re-enter the cool lofty place in which she had disturbed him.

Dinah sat in silence. She was aware of the comfortable structure of their home enclosing them, filled with pictures and furniture and all the insulating drift of their joint possessions. How many things, she wondered, remembering the packing cases in which they had been shipped to Franklin. How many cups, and scarves, and books, and teapots.

Matthew turned a page. She watched the way he reached out unseeingly for his glass, his fingers quivering a little until they connected with the stem.

Dinah looked at her husband and wondered, do I love him or hate him? Did I do it alone, this thing, or did I do it because it was what Matt wanted?

‘Matthew?’

He rubbed the inner corners of his eyes, sighing, working his middle fingers under the lenses so that the frame bobbed over his nose.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m all adrift here in this place. I want to go back home, to look for her.’

His face hardened. His flexible mouth became a slit and the planes of his cheeks and forehead turned boxy.

‘You can’t do that, Dinah. Why torment yourself?’

‘Why not be like you, you mean? Indifferent?’ Her voice whipped him.

‘I’m not indifferent.’

The telephone rang. For three, four rings neither of them moved, and then Dinah slowly got up and lifted the receiver. Even from where he was sitting Matt could recognise Sandra Parkes’s high insistent voice. Dinah listened as it nibbled on, saying yes, yes okay, nodding as she spoke.

‘Of course we can,’ she added at length. ‘If Milly’s happy with that we’d be glad to have her.’

There was another high-pitched torrent of talk. And then Dinah said, ‘Friday, then. Yes, yes. That’s fine.’ She replaced the receiver.

‘Ed and Sandra have got to go out to the coast for three days. Something to do with a movie deal for one of Ed’s books. Sandra wondered if Milly could come to us.’

‘I’m taking the boys up to the cabin in Vermont for the weekend. Had you forgotten?’

Max Berkmann had promised a loan of their summer cabin. Matt was going to take the boys fishing and hiking, although neither of them had shown much enthusiasm for the prospect.

‘Yes, I had,’ Dinah admitted. ‘It doesn’t matter. Milly and I will be okay here.’

She hesitated for a moment, but Matt was shifting his papers, ready to immerse himself in them again. He had closed off her plea with his hard face. Not now, she told herself. Don’t try to talk about it now.

‘I’m going up to bed,’ she said at last.

‘I’ll be up soon,’ he told her, although she knew he would not be.

THREE

Dinah imagined that to have Milly in the house for two or three days would be to have a companion.

In the muffled, dead-weighted time after her visit to Jenny Abraham, Dinah planned how Milly and she would cook and talk and watch TV together, maybe even go shopping for clothes. Out of the brief affinity that had flickered between them she constructed in her head a temporary daughter and allowed herself awkward, unspecific imaginings in which Milly confided in her in some way, and she was able to offer advice and comfort.

Dinah looked forward to the weekend visit, and when the time came she confidently waved Matt and the boys off at the beginning of their drive up into Vermont.

‘You won’t be lonely?’ Matt asked, as he was halfway into the loaded Toyota. ‘You could still join us, you know. Bring the Parkes girl as well.’

‘Milly. Her name’s Milly. No, we’re going to stay here and have a women’s weekend.’

Matthew caught her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. After a minute he said, ‘Good. You look all right.’

‘Of course. Why not?’

After they had driven away Dinah went back into the house with the sense of having become someone who sometimes did not look all right, as if another person’s face had become superimposed upon her own.

Ed and Sandra arrived with Milly later that Friday evening. Milly unfolded herself from the back of the Porsche and hoisted a very small and shabby black canvas rucksack over her shoulder. She seemed to be wearing exactly the same clothes as the last time Dinah had seen her.

The adults moved into the house, with Milly at a little distance behind them. It was the first time the Parkeses had been to Dinah’s house. Looking at his watch, Ed refused her offer of tea or a drink.

‘We should get to the airport,’ he said. Out of the corner of her eye Dinah saw Milly turn her head to gaze blank-faced out of the window. She had not put her rucksack down.

‘Dinah, this is so good of you,’ Sandra murmured, but the words were at odds with her expression. She stood awkwardly halfway between Ed and Milly, unable to move closer to either of them. Clearly it was important that she go with Ed to perform whatever service it was he required of her, but equally clearly she did not want to leave Milly behind with Dinah. Torn between the two halves of her family, Sandra’s confusion crystallised in hostility to Dinah. She twisted the silver bracelets on her wrist as if adjusting her armour. Her face was cramped with jealousy. ‘I wanted Milly to come to LA with us, of course. But she absolutely won’t.’

Milly continued to stare in the opposite direction, her rucksack clutched against her chest. Dinah guessed that Milly knew exactly how to cause dismay and discord at home. She wondered what it was the child wanted to punish her parents for.

But she only said, ‘I’ve been looking forward to it. We’ll have a good time, the two of us.’

‘Sure you will,’ Ed said heartily. ‘Now, come on, honey. You know the Friday traffic.’

They went out into the street again, Milly trailing in her heavy boots, the embodiment of sulky reluctance. Dinah suppressed a sudden urge to turn round and shake her. The child was getting what she apparently wanted, after all.

Ed and Sandra both kissed Milly, who did not return their embrace. The Porsche cleared its throat, over-loud in the quiet of the street, and swung away towards Boston and the airport.

Milly tilted her head, and the black knotted strands of hair fell back to show her white neck.

‘Your house is the same as all the others.’

Without looking Dinah saw the various white wooden houses with green-painted shutters, porches and steps, old Mr Dershowitz’s at the end shabbier than the others, and grass dotted with shrubs and trees. She felt no more fixed in this serene suburbia than she had done a year before.

‘Similar. We can’t all live in fantasy castles in the woods, can we? You’re welcome here, anyway.’

‘Yeah,’ Milly said.

‘Is all your stuff in that one bag?’

‘Stuff?’

‘Everything you need for the weekend. Change of clothes, washbag, book, cosmetics. Middle-aged baggage, crap, is that what you’d call it?’

A shrug. ‘Yeah.’

Milly followed her into the house. Dinah led her through the rooms, showing her the place where she would sleep, the boys’ playroom, the bathroom. Milly dropped her little bag on her bed and sat down, barely rippling the smooth white cover. She stared out of the window into the steely blue twilight.

‘I’ll leave you to sort yourself out,’ Dinah said. ‘I’ll be downstairs making some supper, when you’re ready.’

Milly reappeared a little later. She leaned in the kitchen doorway with her thin arms wrapped across her chest, defensive.

‘There’s no TV.’

‘Yes, there is. Through there, in the den. I showed you.’

‘In my room.’

Dinah had forgotten her moment of irritation. She considered her present urge to propitiate this child, to move televisions and rearrange her house, so that in return she would smile and talk and look upon her as a friend.

‘No. We don’t let Jack and Merlin watch in their bedrooms. If we did, they’d never do anything else. Switch it on now in the den, if you want. Are you ready to eat? It’s pizza.’

‘I don’t eat pizza.’

‘Four-cheese and tomato. I know you’re a vegetarian.’

‘Vegan.’

For God’s sake, Dinah thought. ‘So what do you eat?’

‘Rice. Pulses. Fruit. Tofu.’

There was a distant clicking sound and then a skidding rush as Ape emerged from his lair in the utility room. He stopped short when he saw Milly and his legs stiffened as he launched into a volley of barking. A thin thread of spittle roped down from his furious jaws. Milly scrambled away from him, almost falling, and wedged herself behind the table. Her lips went white, making their dark crayon outlining bloom lividly.

She’s afraid of the dog, Dinah thought. She’s a scared little girl.

‘Ape, quiet. Sit now. Dead dog. He’s quite all right, Milly. Ugly but harmless, look.’

The dog subsided, sighing and panting. Dinah went to Milly and put her hand on her shoulder to reassure her, drawing her closer in a half-hug. Her fingers felt prominent bones through the layers of matted wool.

‘I hate dogs,’ Milly snapped.

‘So did I, as it happens. Ape belongs to the boys. Shall I cook you some brown rice? If that’s all you eat it’s no wonder you’re thin, but …’

Milly wrenched away from her. Her eyes glittered between the hanks of hair. ‘Why do you think you can touch me? What gives you the right to make personal remarks about me?’

An answering spurt of anger burned in Dinah for an instant. They looked at each other, barefaced, waiting.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dinah. She dragged Ape away by the collar and shut him in the utility room. Milly trailed off into the den and watched a game show on television while Dinah cooked her food. She could see through the open door that Milly was curled up with her boots resting on the cushions.

When it was ready she ate the plain rice and then a banana, but she deflected all Dinah’s attempts at conversation while she did so. They finished the meal, picking at their opposing dishes in silence.

‘Shall we go out and see a movie?’ Dinah suggested when the plates had been cleared away.

Milly’s black mouth twitched with a suggestion of sarcastic amusement. ‘Thanks, but no. You go, if you want.’

‘I can hardly go out and leave you here alone, can I?’

She stared. Her eyes were black-painted and the lashes were thickly spiked with mascara. Dinah noticed for the first time the colour of her irises, a pale greenish hazel. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I told Sandra I’d look after you.’

Another shrug, dismissing her. ‘Well, okay. That’s between the two of you. I’m going upstairs.’

She went, closing the door with a snap. Dinah sat on at the kitchen table, listening to Ape lumbering about in the confined space between the washing machine and the boiler. She imagined that Milly would be sitting on the unfamiliar bed, arms wrapped around her knees. She wanted to go up and tap on the door, open it and slip into the room and perch on the bed beside her, to twist a blade between the clamped halves of Milly’s shell and prise it open so that the child could be reached.

Another voice, a colder tone of her own inner monologue warned her, it isn’t Milly who needs that. It’s you.

Dinah pressed her knuckle against her mouth. Her thoughts tipped sideways and away from her. Thetford. England. A house, probably on an estate somewhere. Another bedroom, a child’s room with animal posters and family photographs. Not her family.

The telephone rang. Dinah lifted it and heard Nancy’s voice.

‘Hi. Listen, Linda and Maria are coming over for a drink and a sandwich. We thought we might play a couple of hands of poker or something dumb like that. Want to join us since you’re a free woman?’

‘I can’t. I’m not. I’ve got Milly Parkes staying the weekend, Ed and Sandra have gone to LA.’

‘Sweet Jesus, rather you than me.’

Is this what I’d rather? Dinah wondered, as she hung up. Rather a clumsy attempt to bond with another woman’s child, who looks at me as if she despises me?

When she went up to bed the closed door of Milly’s room confronted her. She hesitated briefly and then silently eased it open. Milly was asleep, lying on her side with the covers pulled tightly up around her. Her face looked younger, smoothed out by sleep. There were streaks of black eyepaint on the white pillowcase.

In the morning Dinah was downstairs early. She loaded the washing machine and fed Ape, promising that she would take him out for a proper walk later. Perhaps Milly would want to come, and they could take one of the paths that led through the woods beside the Franklin river. It was another white-skied day, but perceptibly colder than it had been. Bare fingers of branches were beginning to show through the burst of fall colour, and waves of burnt-out leaves accumulated beneath the trees.

The morning crept on, until Dinah had done all her usual chores and found herself some extra ones as well. When she looked out into Kendrick she saw that most of the driveways were empty; everyone had gone off about their Saturday morning business. There was no sound from upstairs. The silence of the house began to oppress her. She felt confined and then, with a sudden clap within her head, anxious for Milly. Of course she couldn’t be asleep all this time. Something must be wrong.

She ran up the stairs two at a time and rapped on the closed door.

‘Yeah.’

Milly was sitting on the bed, fully dressed. Clearly she had been staring vacantly out of the window. Dinah wondered for how long. She had preferred to sit alone in an empty spare room rather than come downstairs and seek Dinah’s company.

The evaporation of her anxiety fuelled another spurt of anger, a stronger flame than last night’s.

‘Why didn’t you come down? Don’t you want any breakfast?’

Milly regarded her, judging the effects of her behaviour.

‘What is there? Pizza?’

‘Brown bloody rice and bananas, if that’s what you want.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Milly, what’s the matter? You must eat something. I don’t want to force you into anything …’

‘You couldn’t. Don’t bother to try.’

‘… but you’re here, and I’m responsible for you for this time, and it would make it pleasanter for us both if you were co-operative.’ I sound like the mother in some nineteen-fifties radio drama. We haven’t even got a common language.

There was no answer. Milly’s eyes wandered back to the window. Dinah made a last attempt, breathing through the rising waves of her irritation.

‘Come downstairs. Have some breakfast and then we’ll go and buy tofu and mung beans. We can take Ape for a walk by the river. Or drive over to Northampton, there’s a shop there …’

Milly leaned forward on the bed. One knee protruded through a hole in her black knitted leggings. Her chin jutted out as her gaze swerved back to Dinah.

‘What do you want? Do you need some kind of a doll that you can take out for walks and dress up in frocks and tip upside down to say Mama?’

Dinah’s heart knocked in her chest, squeezing the breath against her ribs. ‘Why are you so rude?’

‘Is it rude to say what you think?’

‘Yes. Don’t you know that?’