The light from the fire but the otherwise darkness means I only see half my mother’s face. We are sitting in her father's study, a grim room, grimmer for his portrait which hangs in ceremony above the desk.
"He was ill," is how my mother defended his hollowed cheeks and brooding brows; the darkness about the eyes which reminded me of the way a storm comes in - how the air turns green and a low rumble is felt in the marrow of the bones.
We are having supper on our laps. My grandmother has brought a tray and set it on a table in front of the fire. Three bowls of soup, three apples from the tree outside the window. The apples, I know well, are sweet, but no matter when they are picked – off the ground or directly off the tree – their skins are wrinkled. Like they are old and always have been.
But she has forgotten the napkins and has gone back to fetch them from the kitchen – through the sitting room, through the hall, and up the small ramp my grandfather had waiting for my mother when she came home from the hospital.
I never knew my grandfather, but I can picture him. There he is on a platform waiting for his morning train to London. He’s an important man by the looks of it - an architect heading to a drawing board. You know he’s one of those because when he gets to his office, there are pencils in the picture, T-squares and tracing paper. And as he leans into the creamy beam of an Anglepoise, he runs a craggy hand through his slightly thinning, raven hair.
Or is it the family man I heard of once? The man in rolled-up sleeves, pressing a blanket into the back of an old Zodiac because it had occurred to him that a little outing might be nice. He wouldn't say where they were going - it was a surprise - and he told my grandmother to hurry with the sandwiches. Later, as they sat in a row on a moonlit beach and passed along a flask of tea, my mother may have eased off her shoes, pushed her toes in the sand and wondered - beneath a sky peppered with stars - if that excruciating specialness could ever last.
My grandmother returns with the napkins. We each have our own rings. My mother’s is wood, mine is ivory. My grandmother's was once silver, but the silver has worn. The ring is irregular, beaten out of shape by time and rough treatment. My mother undoes her napkin and places it over her knees. She reaches forward and brings the bowl toward her as if it holds a thing of the utmost fragility. A bird with a broken wing, or a perfect sphere of dandelion seeds. The soup barely stirs.
When we have finished with our supper, I will push my mother up the ramp and she’ll go to the bedroom her father fashioned from an old shed. No evidence remains of the shed’s former self. Gone, the mower and rakes, the clippers and flower pots; the dank floor that smelled of peat and earth and rotting mushroom. Those features were cleared in a jiffy, puttied over, seamlessly reconfigured in keeping with the Georgian architecture of the house my grandparents bought as newlyweds.
Because there were steps to the front door, my grandfather broke a hole in an old stone wall and laid a path to the back. The path wound around the garden, turning right under the magnolia, left under the Judas. He took particular care with the bricks; he didn’t want my mother’s wheels to catch. But over time, the roots of the Judas pushed up. The bricks buckled, and in early May - dotted with pink confetti after a rain - they became slippery.
Cercis siliquastrum. Also known, because of the shape of its leaves, as Love Tree.
Sometimes, when the dew was still in the grass, my grandmother and I would go down to the bottom of the garden to see if the fairies had been. Because it was damp down there, moss grew thickly and if we were lucky we'd find little circles of mushrooms with soft, fawny caps. My mother never went. There were steps to the bottom lawn. They were steep. Clumps of fern grew up between the stones and it was easy for anyone to lose their footing. Once or twice we found a toad hunched in those stones, and I was driven ever after to search for those same glum eyes.
My grandmother has finished her soup and is peeling her apple. She does it briskly, skinning each quarter and digging out the pips. It’s a different process when she makes a pie. Then, quick as a flash, she skins the apple in a spiral. The table, then, will be strewn with ringlets of peel which – once I’m a teenager – I toss over my shoulder to find out the first initial of the boyfriend I hope for, but don't yet have. I put great faith in the predictive power of these spirals not because of the spirals themselves but because of my grandmother and the magic she sprinkles in.
But those were mostly daytime things. Things lit by sunlight or the gray drip that only just made it out from a covering of cloud. The day always ends here, in this room. The light that was lingering in the trees outside the study window has gone. We eat our apples to the flicker of the fire, the walls around us a moving backdrop to our supper. As the fire dies, our four faces become indistinct until they are gone altogether.
AB - 5.1.23
Beautiful! Often pass the house when I am in Dorking x
I always feel like I'm in the room when I read your writing. Is the photo of the actual house?