Time and Tide Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Picador ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  To John and Suzanne Mados, my staunch friends

  Pour your eternal dreams, samples of blood

  From one glass to another.

  —Osip Mandelstam (translated by James Greene)

  The spider spins her web on dark days.

  —Proverb

  Prologue

  “Do you believe her?” she said. Once said, it cannot be unsaid. That is the thing with words. You cannot wash them and wipe them the way you wipe dishes, which was what she was doing, merely to cancel out the brutality of what she had just said. Four words. Four treacheries. He said nothing, his anger taking a great inner lurch, and then he walked out of the kitchen, leaving the tap running. At least from now on when she came to turn it on or off, the handle would yield to her grasp. How many times over the years had she marvelled at his strength and his brother’s strength, children, her children possessed of a power and a determination that she had never mastered. Now the breach. Not long ago by chance she had read something that was a premonition of this, read it in a doctor’s waiting room and copied it out slowly, methodically, so that it spoke itself back to her in her long kitchen, which looked like the deck of a liner, the floor a bleached blue with pale blue walls to match. Now they were both gone. Paddy to his watery rest and Tristan about to set out for Penny’s top-floor flat, with its cushions and its empty bird cage suspended on a long plaited golden cord. She had gone there once and was coldly received, so coldly that she took in every feature of the room, even the missing bars of the cage in which Penny kept her toiletries, brush and comb, and bottles of deepest blue-reliquaries of what? She could imagine Tristan arriving with his luggage, maybe even carrying a can of beer, making light of his sudden but irreversible appearance, and Penny’s secret whoops of victory that she had won out over that all-important, hovering creature, the Mother. Between mothers and would-be mothers this great chasm.

  * * *

  “In the morning of life the son tears himself loose from the Mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battles to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself, a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down into the realm of the Mothers…”

  * * *

  It spoke itself in the long blue kitchen with the sun marching in, in elongated slants, their fat shadows beside them and the creeper coming through both window and window frame, so that the effect was of an indoor garden. Yes, the grave words fell on each little thing, the drawers half open, where she or maybe even Tristan had taken out a knife, a wooden spoon, or a clean tea cloth. She never did close drawers fully. Her husband had castigated her about that, said it was manifest of the same dithering as when she walked down the street and showed a deficient character by her cowardly back.

  What could she do now to retrieve things. She thought of rushing down the stairs to his bedroom with as normal a manner as artifice can manage and asking, “Would you like a cup of tea?” or, “Let’s talk,” but she could not do it, and maybe there was another reason, an unthinkable reason, which is that she wanted him to go, simply because it was something she had always dreaded. One little skein of thought at odds with all else said it had to be, this separation, and that one day he would feel the selfsame sorrow over a child of his, a son or a daughter, and in that instant know the cruel indissoluble overlapping of memory which binds us to our past. He would take the dog, too, take Charlie. Charlie was Paddy’s dog, but had grown fond of her, gave her the paw, licked her knuckles, and watched, slavering, as she cut up his sausage for a treat, forgetting that she had commited him that lunatic week to the dogs’ home. Tristan had gone there and retrieved him. Found Charlie among all the other woebegone rejects, brought him home, washed him, pampered him, and cared for him as he was about to care for Penny. Why?

  “Do you believe her?” she had said when he told her that Penny, that black scowl of a girl, was pregnant and that probably it was Paddy’s but she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, nor could Paddy at the bottom of the Thames, perhaps by now not even there but gobbled up by the sea creatures and the sea monsters. She clung to the little story he used to tell her about the souls of drowned bodies becoming seagulls, and in her river walks she looked for them, expecting one that might seize her with a look that was not birdlike.

  Although her lips said these hard, rancorous things, inside, her heart, or wherever it is that feelings dwell, was spilling, so that she wanted to contradict what she had just said, wanted to say, “I’m saying these things because you have all gone from me, you have cut yourself off from me. Come back to me; even let Penny be civil to me and I will not say these hard things, because they are not what I truly feel.” How should she still be here, wiping dishes, wiping anything that was on the stainless-steel ledge, spoons, knives, forks, now washing the dog’s bowl, the fawn bowl that said DOG and had the remains of yellow corn in it, the meat all eaten up because Charlie liked the meat, even though it oozed a brown, gravy stuff, when she should be mending the rift? She would wash this bowl, and while she washed it something would happen. A redemption, one of those miraculous swings which meant that he would come up the stairs, whistling to denote a truce, and say that he was not leaving, at least not for a few days, and then when he did leave, it would not be in high dudgeon but in a state of grace. Grace. She had had so much of it once. Do these traits die or just get drained out of one, or do they remain, waiting for a resurgence? It must of course seem to Tristan as if all her pity had gone out of her, or solidified, and yet that was not true; no, that was not true.

  She could hear him packing or, rather, moving furniture in the room just underneath. Why did he have to drag furniture in order to pack? She couldn’t tell. It was probably putting books and clobber into boxes, and along with all those things he would take as well the miniature rocking horse with its milky white paint, which in places was scratched, and the Chinese leather hatbox that she had given him and the sword that someone, an earlier girlfriend, had given him towards the end of their romance, and the several suits and jackets which he never wore but wouldn’t part with. She bet her life that the metal hangers, a medley of them from the dry cleaner’s, would be on the floor in a heap, a bequest on which she could skewer herself, take a lordly lunge.

  Once, in New York, on stage, she saw a woman, a black woman, reenact aborting herself with one of those hangers, and so befuddled were her thoughts now that she believed that the child she was aborting in her was a memory child. She yearned to forget everything, even them. But nothing is forgotten. It follows you from the city to the country, stoops with you as you bend to tie your shoelace, trots into the shed where you get the hose, even pursues you down into the bowels of a ship if you happen to be a seafaring man. Yes, their voices clear as bells, lightish in tone, oh so long ago, like a refrain filtering back from beyond the cold immensities.

  Part I

  1

&nb
sp; My Uncle Billy had a ten-foot willy,

  Showed it to the girls next door.

  They thought it was a snake

  And hit it with a rake

  And now it’s only four foot four.

  Prodigal they were, with song riddle and recitation. They even climbed the apple tree although forbidden to and shook the apples in a welter … “A dozen for thruppence … a dozen for thruppence,” they said, careless now of being reprimanded. Their father was asleep. Now and then they tore into the kitchen, openly said her name, said, “Is she here yet, Nellie?”

  The arrival of the new girl had in some way infected them as if they knew she was going to bring excitement into their lives. They loved excitement. They trotted out the word “bored” as an adult might, thought Saturdays quite boring, Sundays very boring, what with the constitutionals on the common and having to behave like good boys all the time, while inside, two reckless little hearts were beating and conspiring.

  “My Uncle Billy,” she was hearing, sometimes to different tunes; sung in unison, or a duet, sung in opposition, sung until they were hoarse and had to pause for a moment and ask for drinks, soft drinks. They loved the sound of the word “soft.”

  “You’ll have sore throats by evening,” she said, pointing to their Fair Isle sweaters, many-threaded, lying on a bit of muddy garden. What would her mother say? Her mother had knit these sweaters and sent them by registered post. Her mother loved them, lived for their annual summer holiday, wrote months ahead to tell what she would be cooking, indeed offered them a choice, asked if for their first meal they would like boiled chicken or roast; the advantage of boiled was the broth which, of course, she would season. They seemed to like seasoning. Yes, her mother loved them. Princes, she called them. Two little princes. Barbarians. She also asked in her letter, her mother did, if they would bring bags for the jams and jellies that she had made for them. She listed the flavours: black currant, bramble, and of course crab apple. While they were there she spooned these jellies onto scones for them, and they ate until, as they said, they had “little corporations.” Her mother had told them that word and other grown-up words, such as disgusting. Porridge was disgusting. She sat them alternately on her knee and sang:

  Dan Dan the Dirty Man

  Washed his face in the frying pan,

  Caught his hair in the leg of the chair,

  Dan Dan the Dirty man …

  When they were there they went to bed very late, long after dark, making much about seeing stars and moonlight and so on, since they could not be pleasantly seen in a city. Far too precocious. Her mother brought them lemonade and biscuits to bed, brought the tin so they could choose. They argued over this, both of course wanting the same ones, and called each other the ugliest names, which often escalated into pillow fights. One prevented the other from having his favourite biscuit by bruising it to pieces when it was the last one; then after the inevitable bawling there had to be a peace, and like nice little chaps they had to make up. That was her mother’s doing. When they shook hands they laughed, even marvelled at the show of temper and the fluency of bad words that they had at their disposal. When her mother wasn’t looking, one of them crept out and brought the dog, Dixie, up. Dixie was not supposed to be up there, not supposed to be in the house at all, even Dixie herself knew it. She cowered and tried to bolt halfway down the stairs, but they dragged her by her big amber mane, brought her into the room, fed her biscuit crumbs, gave her a sup of lemonade, poured it onto the bone lid of a jewelry box, in fact did heinous things. Dixie was warned not to bark or yelp and not to do number one or number two.

  “No, no. One,” one said.

  “Oy oy. No, no. Two,” another said, and saying it and repeating it, they laughed until they feared they would burst. When her mother came to kiss them good night, Dixie was under the bed, with the green chenille bedspread low down, and as her mother tried to tuck it in they told the most elaborate lies, such as they had fever or had claustrophobia or some other high-flown thing. Hearing of a fever urged the grandmother to make them a hot drink, and this they did not refuse, because they hated going to sleep; they hated dreams and all that and already claimed to be the victims of nightmares.

  What would become of them? Nell thought that morning, admitting that this hilarity they were showing was a little too much. They knew something. They guessed. That’s why they laughed and spluttered and shook the remaining apples onto the grass, then dived down and scooped bits out of them and left the scooped-out apples on the lawn, rendering them useless for stewing or jam. Anyhow, the wasps were on them at once.

  It was autumn; wherever she looked there were wasps—converging on the butter dish, buzzing on the onion-shaped lid, around the ledge where she had geraniums and cacti to brighten things up, on the draining board, in the garden itself, in the scooped-out apples, and once in the sole of her foot as she ran to fetch some clothes in before a shower. It was like a nail through the foot, quite piercing. Yes, they knew, or they sensed; that was why they put on this perennial show, to leaven things.

  “Is she here yet, Nell … Nello?” Paddy said. Paddy was the elder, and having said it in such a peremptory way, he waited a second to see if perhaps she was going to chastise him. She wasn’t. Tristan then repeated it. When they said her Christian name like that, it meant they were indifferent to any correction, they were in a kind of intoxication.

  “Not yet,” Nell said, adding that probably the new girl had missed the bus and was now at a bus stop awaiting another. The buses came to the lane every twenty minutes. They lived on the outskirts of London, and transport to and fro was not easy, another reason why she disliked the place. “The Styx,” she called it, but of course only to herself. Her husband, Walter, had chosen it, said it was healthy, there being a park opposite, and that the trees produced the necessary oxygen for the children’s lungs. Nothing wrong with their lungs, she thought. They were now pelting each other with butts and the sleeves of their sweaters.

  What would her mother say if she knew, but of course she did know. Her mother had never liked her husband, Walter; none of her family had, tried to stop her, but she bested them, ran from an upstairs room where they had locked her, got out a window and down the stone, holding on to each ridge as if by the skin of her feet, bolted down the back avenue so as not to be seen, and then very casually, as it were, thumbed a lift, telling the lorry driver that she had to go to see a doctor in the city. In the city she took a bus to the capital and then another bus to his abode, told her sorry tale, was gently treated by him, given coffee from a brown earthenware pot, coffee and stone-ground biscuits. She would never forget it. He was glad to take her in; he was lonely, too, had been without female company for a few years. Later that day he even drove her to a big town not far from them and sent her with money to the drapery shop to buy clothes, because she had come hands down except for the clothes on her back. She bought underwear and stockings and a nightie, and a pink dress with little swellings all over it like blisters. He did not like it very much. He liked her. She was afraid of him. She was obedient.

  Her family wrestled to get her back—first force, then pleading, then her mother’s heart attack, then her mother’s second heart attack, then her mother on three kinds of pills, and so on. In the end they were almost happy to see her married, or “fixed up,” as they called it. Better than seeing her as a concubine. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Oh yes, her mother guessed that it was not roses. She could see it clearly on the last holiday, when her husband and she never addressed a word to each other and when even on the nights when they played cards around the kitchen table Walter made sarcastic remarks about her brainlessness. Her mother guessed and felt inwardly vindicated, but outwardly said nothing. The row did not come about that, about her husband’s alienation from her; the row of course came about the children and their upbringing. She was in the scullery washing up; she washed up a lot to appear good in her mother’s eyes and also to pass the time, because there was nothing else to do; she
washed cutlery and dishes and tin cans in which milk had been, in which there was a lingering sour smell. She washed them and rinsed them. She was washing shelves, the shelves that were covered with linoleum with a pattern of robins on it. Her mother was gutting two chickens in the kitchen on the table on layers of newspaper. Cockerels for next day’s lunch. She called Nellie in quite sternly.

  “Nellie,” she said, “come in here for a moment.”

  From the tone Nell feared the worst and quaked. She held a cup and a tea cloth in her hand to give herself authority, to give herself something to do.

  “Where are those children going to be educated, in what kind of school?”

  “We don’t know yet, we haven’t decided,” Nell said, using the royal we. She and Walter and the children were leaving Ireland and going to England, and Paddy, the elder, was ready for school, since he was five.

  “Are they going to a Catholic school?” her mother asked.

  “I told you, I don’t know yet,” Nell said, and watched her mother draw the innards out with gusto, then drop them anywhere, often missing the newspaper that was supposed to take this refuse. Brown, khaki, and red innards were all jumbled together, the little beating livers frail and helpless in contrast to the roped neck and the plump grey gizzards.

  “You must give me your word,” her mother said.

  “I won’t … They’re our children,” Nell said, whereupon her mother flared up, poked savagely in the cavern of the bird, and broke the sac, letting acrid stuff spill over the pimply flesh. One word led to another. Words flying about like implements. Walter came from the next room, her father from another room where he had been reading the morning paper, and now four people were arguing, accusing, saying festering things, until suddenly her husband grasped her arm, a thing he had not done for many a moon, led her away, and said, “We don’t have to put up with this barbaric behaviour.”