LITMIR.BIZ

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even a little of what she loved. She looked out of the window, across a wide, black field over which birds gathered and then dispersed. It was beginning to get dark although it was still only three o’clock. She felt oppressed and anxious, as if this small house was cast adrift on floodwaters, without a compass or proper provisions. Molly was keen on the acquisition and preservation of provisions. As a child the stories she had loved the most always involved families in extremis eking out bitter winters with a small box of onions and turnips and fashioning pathetic, yet admirable playthings out of twigs and balls of wool. She liked fictional characters who bottled and salted their way through their lives and nobly stacked their larders with the labours of their presumably very rough, red hands or who, when left on desert islands, conjured up ingenious accommodation and cunning ways of collecting rain water. She had always celebrated each season by preserving it. Jam from the warm strawberries she had heaped into smeared punnets. Blackberries brought home in jugs and Tupperware boxes and then stashed away in freezer bags. Each sloe carefully pierced and pickled with gin and put in the dark to marinate.

      ‘When’s tea?’ asked Max, rolling onto his back, a rhino in each hand meeting horn to horn.

      ‘Not for ages yet,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’

      ‘Can I have just one chocolate bell from the tree?’ he said. ‘That should tide me over.’ She recognised with pain that this was one of Rupert’s expressions. She thought of him years ago, packing the boot of the car to go away somewhere with more food and drink than they could possibly need. ‘That should tide us over,’ he had said and smiled, and she remembered feeling the safety in the words.

      Max untied a chocolate from the tree, careful to avoid touching the wire from the flashing lights. He had a morbid fascination with electrocution, and the slightest darkening of the skies would provoke dire warnings on the danger of standing under trees and wearing leather-soled shoes. It had been Rupert who had planted the horror in Max’s mind by telling him some outlandish tale of putting his finger into a socket and being thrown through a window and biting all the way through his tongue until he almost choked on his own blood.

      He always was a convincing teller of tall tales. Molly thought about the evening they had first met. He had seemed more vivid and distinct than anyone else in the room. Her eyes had been drawn to him straight away and she had found it hard to stop looking. Rupert had reminded her of a fox, or some other shiny-furred creature. She had always thought of herself, with her pale blue eyes and hair of an indeterminate brown, to be the very reverse of striking. She had often despaired at the soft, almost child-like contours of her face, wanting instead to have high cheekbones and dark, dramatic lashes, the sort of looks that made men catch their breath, and so she’d been astonished when he came straight over to her, as if he had been waiting for her to arrive, although they had never met before.

      ‘You can sit by me,’ he had said, steering her over to the table and the chair next to his. He had talked to her throughout the meal, his eyes never leaving hers, his hands solicitous with butter and wine. When her napkin slid off her lap and fell under the table, he insisted on ducking down and retrieving it. She felt, with shock and excitement, his hand brush her ankle and pause delicately, halfway up her leg.

      They were married six months later. She had set her heart on a dress that she had seen in a shop window. The material was the palest pink and encrusted with crystal beads. It had a tight bosom-enhancing bodice and fitted sexily across the hips and made Molly feel like a decadent princess. Molly thought that being a bride was your one chance to be voluptuous and get away with it. Rupert’s mother, whom she had only met once and whose eyes, on that occasion had shifted over her swiftly as though assessing a metre of fabric, had insisted both on paying for the dress and coming with Molly to choose it. She dismissed the frock Molly had selected with a small sound of distaste and chose instead a severely simple sheath. Although its pale lines were exquisitely cut and it was four times the price of the dress she had wanted, Molly never felt like herself in it – but rather as if she was playing the part of the person that should have been standing by Rupert in the little church that was filled with the scent of lilac.

      They honeymooned in Umbria in a villa that looked out over terraced olive groves and a night sky full of fireflies. They spent their days exploring the nearby towns where Rupert took hundreds of pictures of her by fountains or leaning against yellow walls threaded with caper flowers and quick lizards. Sometimes when he stopped her halfway up some steps and made her turn towards his lens or when he laid down his fork to frame her head exactly beneath an arch she felt as if the sequence of pictures were what made the story for him.

      ‘Smile!’ he said, and she had no trouble obeying, since everything was enchanting to her. She found it endearing that he wanted to record her happiness so minutely. In their muslin-draped four-poster bed Rupert gave her slender body the same earnest attention.

      ‘You are so beautiful,’ he said as his fingers moved over her and into her as if his touch could read her secrets. He discovered the tiny, silvered scar on her breast caused by the removal of a cyst, the dent just above her ankle where she had been bitten by a dog as a child and the raised mole at the top of her inner thigh.

      ‘It’s a kind of inventory,’ he said when she protested that she felt scrutinised. ‘So I’ll know you again if I was blind.’

      He held her open with his fingers and stroked her with his tongue and she was glad and surprised that he wanted her so much. When they got back he carried her carefully over the doorstep of their new home. After advice from his mother, Molly had set about painting it cream, with the occasional wall in heritage grey or papered with large, muted flowers. The first year he took her to all the places he had been to as a child. There was a wood that smelt of wild garlic that was threaded through by a fast, brown river, and a garden with blue and pink hydrangeas the size of a child’s head and a low wall against which they had nestled like lost lambs.

      The phone rang and Molly came out of her reverie with a start.

      ‘Hello?’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Hello?’ she said again, but no one answered and she replaced the receiver. She told herself it was a foreign call centre and that a young man with a made-up British name had been prevented from selling insurance by tangled lines or that a hand in a bag had unknowingly activated a cell phone, but she knew it was him. He often phoned in the early evening, as if the fading light was his prompt to check on where she was.

      ‘Are you alright, Mum?’ asked Max. He sat down next to her on the sofa and put his arms around her neck. She could see her face reflected in the darkened window, as pale and as insubstantial as the ghosts that populated this area of the Fens. One such phantom Fenland farmer was said to regularly return to haunt his land. So precious was the rich black soil, that he ate great chunks of it. His invisible munching left clods disturbed where no tractor had been.

      ‘I’m fine, darling,’ she said to Max, and pulled him onto her lap. She stroked his head, feeling the shape of it under her hands. After a while he wriggled away from her and lay back on the floor and so she got up and drew the curtains against the dark fields.

       Chapter Three

      Carrie woke early on the day the shop was due to open. She switched on the light in the still-darkened room, threw off the quilt that covered her bed and put on the Chinese silk dressing gown that hung on the hook on the bedroom door. In a pre-Christmas bid to lose a few pounds to accommodate the feasting to come, Carrie had decided to start each day with a bowl of porridge made with skimmed milk and a few raisins. She was half hearted in her attempts to lose weight and at thirty-seven, felt she was approaching the time when she would in any case have to choose between her bottom and her face. She had a theory that after forty, the skinnier the arse, the more prune-like the face, unless you overdid the surgery and then you just looked weird. Carrie was tall and long legged and had a face that was at its most beautiful when animated. Her brown eyes were spaced a little too far apart, but her mouth was soft and full and her black hair fell straight and smooth across a wide brow. When she talked she often rubbed her hand across her forehead, as if trying to shape her thoughts before they escaped from her.

      Carrie

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