Eva, well-coiffured, never without make-up, widowed for the second time, describes living without a man. ‘It’s so hard to maintain the house. When I needed to put up a curtain rail I had to find some very high-heeled shoes.’
When I managed, on maybe the seventh or eighth attempt, to sew on with reasonable competence one of those little shisha mirrors beloved of Indian embroidery, I felt that this must be my major accomplishment of the year. But hadn’t I had that feeling just a few weeks before? Back in November when after 15 phone calls I found a suitable nursery place in a distant town for our Ukrainian friends’ little boy, that too seemed like achieving the impossible. And then there had been the Monday morning when I fought back my fear and let myself hang upside down from the ropes in my yoga class — a posture that involves walking up the wall until your feet are at head height, wrapping your legs frog-like into the ropes and lowering your head and body backwards until you hang upside down, facing the room. Even as a child, while my sisters performed somersaults and walked around the garden on their hands, I could not let go enough to do a forward roll, or hang by my legs from the climbing frame with my knickers showing, as they did. I was the weak one, the clumsy one, the uncoordinated, short-sighted, head-in-a-book wimp.
None of these recent ‘achievements’ were things I’d even thought about this time last year. At the start of 2022 I had no idea that yoga, or Indian embroidery, or Ukrainian childcare would become a part of my life, let alone one that was so challenging. There is a saying in current use: ‘it was (or wasn’t) everything we wanted it to be’. But how can you know in advance what anything will be? And if you do know, why bother to do it? Virginia Woolf, planning the move to her new house in Lewes, visualised a life there with ‘spaces of leisure’ that were missing from her current existence. She knew this was a fantasy, ‘But this dressing up of the future is one of the chief sources of our happiness, I believe.’ I’m not sure it’s one I subscribe to. My favourite time is that with no agenda, no structure. And anyway, the best-laid plans rarely work out. Life trips us up in horrible ways — war, illness, an insanely incompetent prime minister trashing the economy. And at the same time it brings us unexpected openings. Things come into our lives that we had not foreseen or planned or dreamed of, and these engage and enrich and challenge us. That, for me, is being alive.
I got involved with two of my new pursuits more or less by accident, after decades of resistance and belief in my own incompetence. But I found myself helping Ukrainian children because, on 24 February, Putin invaded their country, and by a series of chance encounters, two families from Kiev ended up living in our street. I had no idea when we agreed with their host that we would help them settle in, what a massive commitment this would be. That the following six weeks would be almost entirely taken up with form-filling, phone calls, interviews. That Simon and I would become involved in these peoples’ lives, in questions about health and finance and basic survival, at a level more personal than would I venture even with my sister. Or that, when their host decided she wanted her house back, they would have to move to another more affordable part of the country, and we would do it all again. How could I have planned, or wanted, or hoped for the tears, anxiety, bewilderment surrounding the day-to-day trials that are the life of even middle-class, white, relatively affluent refugees in the UK?
But neither did I know that I would be tasting Ukrainian borsch, sweet pancakes, herring and beetroot salad. And how could I have expected that Simon and I would spend a month of Thursday and Friday afternoons baking animal-shaped biscuits, making Hallowe’en decorations, playing games we didn’t understand with two Russian-speaking kids while their parents were both at work?
What will I remember of those long, darkening autumn afternoons, waiting for Mama to come through the door at 8.15 to a rapturous welcome? Three-year old Dominik, pyjamas soaking wet and caked in flour, crowing with delight as his sister filled the kitchen sink to the brim with soapy water? Khrystyna leading us on a mystery expedition all the way through town to a magical park she was unable to describe in terms we recognised, which turned out to be Christ Church Meadow. Dominik sitting curled up in grief, head on his knees, sobbing for his mother for no reason any of us could fathom. Or the lights on his scooter wheels flashing blue and red as we raced after the two children through the streets of Osney at twilight, passers-by leaping out of the way, the kids hurtling onward, giggling and shrieking, into the night.
Baking with the children took me back to a recently unearthed relic from my childhood, The Good Housekeeping Children’s Cook Book, c. 1969. Its few colour plates show girls in home-made party dresses and glossy hairstyles cooking roast dinners, rolling out pastry, grating cheese. They look immaculate, responsible, decidedly middle-aged. The recipes themselves are so familiar I can taste them — raspberry buns, coconut pyramids, peach melba. Each page has step-by-step instructions, accompanied by black and white photos, that spell out everything — how to boil potatoes, fry bacon, brew a pot of tea or coffee. The final page is ‘washing up.’
My memory of using this book as a child is that the outcome was not everything I wanted it to be. In reality the coconut turned out not as a series of neat pyramids but a gooey mess stuck to my hands, the buns exploded in the oven, the potatoes boiled to mush while I was not looking. Life has turned out much the same. The outcome is not a neatly tidied kitchen and a child in a spotless white apron pouring out the gravy. And there is no step-by-step guide, with photos, to what comes next.
Shortly before going to bed, Pierre completes the online sleep survey. He is unable to sleep for worrying about the accuracy of his answers.
The owner of the house we’ve rented emails to say that, if the key safe is frozen when we arrive, Keith and Carole at no. 56 have keys, but they may have moved to their new house in Pier Road. She hasn’t got their phone number because she dropped her own phone down the toilet, and left her address book at her daughter’s. The daughter posted it a week ago, but because of the postal strike it still hasn’t arrived.
When asked, Leo says he doesn’t want to invite anyone to his fourth birthday party. After a while he names just two friends. ‘Is something wrong, Leo?’ his mum asks. ‘Are you worried about your party?’ ‘Yes,’ Leo says, ‘I’m worried that if my friends come they’ll eat all my cake.’
On the last day before she leaves her job in a well-known high-street store (one that makes a point of employing refugees), Katya finally gets her name badge. It says ‘Katy’.
In the novel I will never write are all the untold stories of my life. Some are mine, some belong to others. What ‘really happened’ is beyond knowing. They are pictures in my head, memories, myths, narratives I’ve constructed to make sense of my world, my past and that of others. These are not the tales we tell and retell as a family, at dinners with friends. They are too painful, or private, or powerful to talk about, to diminish, to turn into anecdote.
A couple live in a 1930s semi — huge garden, walk-in larder, real fireplace. It is the house of her dreams, and she is the woman of his, although he only ever tells her what’s wrong with her. One evening, when the roses are in their end-of-summer glory, the dahlias ablaze, she opens the door to an old friend, who tells her he’s finally left his wife. This moment is the end of the boyfriend, the house, the lovely garden, and the start of another life.
New Year’s Eve, late. A woman in a red jacket stands on a deserted shingle beach. There are no stars, the wind is from the east, the waves grey, crashing, oblivious. Behind her the houses along the sea front are lit up like a stage set. She pulls down her hat against the cold, stares at the dark horizon. She does not know what will happen in the tangle of relationships, lies and betrayals her life has become but she knows that this night, on this beach, is hers.
They sit at the table and look at each other. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says. ‘I feel sick. This isn’t the world I live in. It’s like a bad soap opera.’ On her phone is a text from her brother-in-law threatening physical violence, in revenge for a remark she didn’t make.
The early hours of a July morning. Two young people, barely more than teenagers, she in a blue summer dress, he a white T-shirt, walk home from a nightclub through a forest. She knows that he does not really care for her, and that she is wearing the wrong shoes for stumbling through the undergrowth in the dark. He is worrying what his mother will say. The walk takes a long time. In the years afterwards, both of them will turn it into a different story. Above them in the dark sky the clouds fit together like the markings on the skin of a leopard.
In a suburban kitchen, the blinds pulled down, a man watches as a woman with a pony tail opens her hold-all and piles wads of banknotes on the wooden table. At the other end of the room a little girl sits, wide-eyed, eating a plate of pasta and cheese.
When her husband dies of cancer in his 50s the wife, who is difficult, generous, childlike, lucky at cards, is lost. She meets someone else, giggles with him like a schoolgirl, marries in haste. Only after he has taken her house, her possessions, her sense of self, does she admit to her daughter that he beats her. The daughter, still mourning her father and now pregnant, dresses in her smartest maternity clothes and gives evidence in the divorce court.
Winter, dusk. In a badly lit room an old lady — white-haired, painfully thin — sits in an armchair, head bowed. Her daughter stands beside her, holding a glass of water, a palmful of pills. For a long time the older woman doesn’t move . Then she whispers ‘It doesn’t want me to take my tablets’. The daughter looks at the clock, which seems to have stopped moving. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Try this small one.’ The white head droops again. The shadows close in.
In the airport of a city where neither of them live, two people stand either side of a glass wall. He places his hand on the glass, fingers spread. She fits her hand to his for a moment. And walks away.
Caleb is starting to sound out his first short words in reading books. ‘D…a…d……dad!’
‘My dad thinks he’s God,’ he says. ‘But he isn’t.’
The week that George finally gets a hearing aid that works is the week his next-door neighbour employs some roofers whose incompetence is exceeded only by the amount of noise they make.
My father-in-law tells us about the man in his village who has started a ‘grumpy club’. A group of older residents go along once a week to moan, and he tries to get them to see the funny side.
janebuekett 