When we moved into this house, I was pregnant. Wary and uncertain, I was overcome with indecision as soon as we signed on the dotted line. I was moving back to the area I had grown up in; it felt a bit cowardly, unadventurous.
The streets had an uninspiring familiarity that made me feel vaguely ill. (Mind you, I felt nauseous looking at a cup of tea in those days.)
The house had been someone else’s home for a very long time. People had been born here; someone had died here. I never met the woman, the previous occupant, but neighbours alluded to her, to a life truncated by a slow disease. The house wasn’t prepared to relinquish its ghosts when we first put the used key in the front door. It seemed to resent the new management, with our flimsy lampshades and tea chests full of paperbacks
The bedroom carpet was oddly frothy, long, tufty and mermaid green, shrinking back in horror when we stomped our flat, rubber-soled shoes over it. In the living room, the pale yellow wallpaper and pastel pink carpet were reminiscent of a long-ago spring ensemble.
The room itself, small and square and hardly sturdy enough for a good row, was engaged in a futile battle with the very large marble mantelpiece that dominated one wall. The fireplace, a kind of extravagant sarcophagus surrounding the small grate, gave the room a funereal air. It reminded me of an officious tenor who had lost his voice; ready to let rip with the repertoire, his empty, unlit mouth gaped in indignation.
Casualties of war
In the kitchen, one or two greasy, skeletal forks lay abandoned on the linoleum, casualties of someone else’s war. A big square hole had been cut into the work surface, and inside the aperture, precariously held, was a deep fat fryer which, when we arrived that spring morning, was still brimful of a substance that looked and smelled
like sump oil.
We moved here 15 years ago. I’ve never known time to move so fast.
The strongest detail in my memory, stronger than the basins of Ajax liquid, and the scrubbing and washing, and the blocked communal sewer in our backyard, is the tree, the apple blossom tree, growing outside our front door. She was throwing her head from side to side when we arrived, flinging her confetti over our unfestive heads.
“Hi guys,” she whispered to us through her feathery boa, like a girl who was really enjoying the party.
“It’s marvellous, it’s all marvellous,” said my friend, who had come over from London to roll up her sleeves and scrub things.
The other day, when I went outside into a seasonably unseasonal gale to do battle with the brown bin, the apple blossom was up to her shenanigans again, hissing and flirting in the mad breeze, making a snowstorm of her petals.
It had been a strange week, life and death colliding like strangers alighting and boarding the same train. In the midst of the energy and commitment that is inherent in opening a new play, one that you have brooded over like a sleepless midwife for months and months, my friend in London died, suddenly though not unexpectedly.
She was a woman of great good humour and intellect, smart and funny and engaging and a little bit wild, and finally defeated by a disease that she had energetically tried to defend herself against. (The writer Jenny Diski's powerful chronicle of living with cancer, a regular feature of the London Review of Books in recent months, is a reminder of the late Christopher Hitchens's sentiments that the individual does not battle cancer; it is, of course, quite the reverse.)
“Look at me. Look what I can do!” the elderly apple blossom seemed to be saying to me in the suburban gale. “Look how long and beautifully and endlessly I can rejuvenate. Look at how often I can be this glorious bride.”
Schisms and abrasions
Fifteen years in this house. Fifteen springs. Fifteen blossom baths. My eldest son, who on his first day of primary school stood in his brand-new uniform underneath this tree, is now in his last couple of days of secondary school. We’ve all weathered schisms and abrasions and resolutions and celebrations underneath these mad, snowy bowers.
On this occasion, though, I didn’t talk back to the frothy, giddy tree; instead, I wrestled yesterday’s news into the bin and went back inside. Raw, human, puny and mortal, I wasn’t up to her loveliness. On this morning I was no match for her gregarious, beneficent nature.