By David Calcutt

Some three months after her husband died, her daughter and son-in-law suggested that she sell her house and move into somewhere smaller, a flat maybe, that was nearer to where they lived. The old house was too big for her to manage on her own, and it took them a good forty-five minutes or more to get across there, if the traffic was good. And often as not it wasn’t. She took to the idea straight away. She had begun to see how damp and dreary the place had become, and found its smells and its clutter almost unbearable. And of course there would always be the painful associations it held. Life there had become a trouble for her; her sleep was often restless and broken, as she lay listening to the creaks and shuffles and groans of the house at night. She had taken to looking behind doors and under the beds and standing suddenly still in the middle of a room, her heart thumping, her breathing quick and shallow, unable to understand or remember what it was that was making her so anxious.

So on the day her daughter had made the suggestion, she stood outside in the back garden – which had grown unkempt and uncared for– and looked up at the house and said out loud,

“Yes. It’s time to get rid once and for all.”

It was a quick sale. The man who bought it told her that he was going to completely gut it and rent it out. That was fine by her. There was nothing in it she wanted, apart from her clothes and a few precious possessions. She would buy new furniture for the flat and make a fresh start.

“One is never too old to begin again,” she told the man, putting on her best accent.

As soon as he left she phoned her daughter to tell her the good news, and to ask her when the flat would be ready.

“What flat?” said her daughter.

“The flat you said you’d found,” she said.

She heard the edge in her daughter’s voice when she answered.

“Mother, I didn’t say we’d found a flat.”
            “You did.”

“No, I didn’t. We just said you ought to move into one. And we didn’t think you’d sell your house until you’d found one. It wasn’t really a very sensible thing to do, was it?”

She became flustered, which she hated doing when speaking to her daughter. It made her appear weak.

“I didn’t realise…I thought you’d said you’d found a flat…it was a misunderstanding…”

“It certainly was,” said her daughter. And then she didn’t say anything.

“Are you still there?”

Again, the flat, hard voice.

“Yes.”

“What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Her daughter was silent again. Then she said,

“I’d better talk to Richard about it.”

And then she hung up.

Just over a month later she moved into her daughter’s house. Just a temporary arrangement, of course, while they found a suitable flat for her. They had made her up a living space in the back bedroom, which used to be her granddaughter’s room before she moved away. It was a pleasant room, spacious and well-lit by the big window that looked out over the garden where there was a wide lawn bordered on three sides by shrubs and on the fourth by quince bushes. Beyond these was what they called the “wild area”, with a greenhouse and a small vegetable patch behind it that went down to the fence.

Her daughter was pleasant enough, and attentive to her needs, though there was that tension still between them over the business at the funeral. Her son-in-law had little to do with her, and she with him, and that suited them both. During weekdays she had the house to herself as they were both out working. Her son-in-law was a primary school teacher and her daughter had her own podiatry business. But she was glad of the company in the evenings, even if she spent much of the time in her room, and it was especially reassuring at night to know that there was someone else in the house.

She rose late and after showering and breakfast she sometimes listened to the radio and read, and sometimes she took the bus into town where she would browse in the shops and market place and then have a coffee and a pastry in the supermarket café. She was saddened to see how many stores had their shutters down, irritated by the amount of litter in the streets. And the market was not nothing like she remembered it. She realised that the town had left her behind, and became upset, and she couldn’t wait until she was on the bus back home again. Except of course that it wasn’t her home.

“That’s gone, she said to herself, “and not before time too.”  Still, it would be nice to have a place of her own.

In the quiet afternoons, or in the evenings, when the weather was fine, she liked to stand at the window in her room and look down at the garden. She was drawn to the fine rowan tree that grew in the middle of the lawn. It was a mature tree, lithe and slender, and when autumn came, when the shrubs were shedding their petals and the rest of the garden was gradually being drained of its colour, the bright red berries clustered together on its branches, and its leaves turning a deep gold colour, made it seem almost as if the tree was ablaze with flame. She imagined a young woman standing among the flames, performing a graceful dance, and she raised her arms and copied the young woman’s movements, swaying her body from side to side at the window, and felt herself to be young and graceful once more, untouched and unsullied by the world.

She began to feel that the rowan tree was her only true friend and comforter. This was made clear to her a few weeks after she moved in. She woke one night very suddenly and lay with her fists clenched under the quilt. She was hot and her nightgown was damp where it pressed against her skin. Her jaw ached. There was an oppressive atmosphere in the room, as if a weight was pressing down on her, stale-breathed and sensual, and she struggled to kick back the quilt and sit up with her legs over the side of the bed. Her breathing was very irregular and she grew afraid, and she could feel the fear turning into panic.

“No, “ she said aloud, “Not again. No!”

Then before it took a firm hold of her she pushed herself onto her feet and stumbled across the room to the window and stood there, gripping the windowledge and staring out through the cold glass. Standing alone in the middle of the lawn, the rowan tree seemed the only thing of substance in the shifting shadows of the night. Its roots went down into the earth, anchored it there, fixed and stable. She felt her own disturbed spirit begin to settle, as if being gently but firmly gathered into place by those same graceful roots. And the silent dancer moved within her, as it moved within the tree, and all became balanced and poised and even once more.

Then came the argument. It had been brewing for some time, ever since she’d moved in with them, really, and there was something inevitable about it when it finally did break, though it seemed to catch all three of them off-guard, and left them feeling drained and fractious, and with nothing resolved.

It began one evening after tea. Usually, she ate her meals alone in her room. But every now and then she would join them downstairs in the evening. And on this evening, as they were clearing away after the meal, she made a casual and innocent remark about her son-in-law’s frequent visit to the bathroom at night, meaning nothing by it, and spoken in a light-hearted and offhand way. But her son-in-law, as was his nature, took offence at it, denying that he made any such nocturnal visits.

“Well,” she said, “there’s somebody going up and down the landing at night, clumping like a great elephant, and it’s keeping me awake.”

She shouldn’t have said it, because straight away her daughter turned and snapped at her.

“Nonsense, mother. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You must be imagining the whole thing.”

“Oh, yes?” she said. “Imagining it. Am I? Well I must have a very vivid imagination, then, that’s all I can say.”

Neither her daughter nor son-in-law made any reply. Instead, they began to clear  away the plates. And it could have ended there. She could have just stood up from the table and gone to her room and it would all have blown over, at least for the time being. But instead she stayed where she was and called out to them as they went into the kitchen.

“I suppose you’ll be saying next that I’m not all there.”

And her daughter called back.

“I didn’t say that, mother.”

“You didn’t need to,” she said. “I know you think it.”

Her daughter came in from the kitchen and stood in the doorway. Her voice when she spoke was calm and measured and unforgiving.

“Yes,” she said. “And there are some who might say I have every reason to.”

And then it all came out, everything that had been building since she’d first moved in with them, and before, all the unspoken anger and bitterness, about the funeral and what had happened there, and how her behaviour had been shameful, shocking everyone in the church, an insult to the memory of her father, as outrageous as it was unexpected, and her daughter would never understand why she’d done that, right in the middle of the service, what could have possessed her to do something so disgraceful, and the only thing she could put it down to was, yes, indeed, her mother was not in her right mind.

She sat, silently, weathering the onslaught, and, when her daughter had finished, rose slowly to her feet, gripping the edge of the table to keep herself steady. Her legs were trembling and she was finding it difficult to control her breathing. She wanted to say something, to try and explain things to her daughter, but it was all too complicated, too difficult even for herself to understand properly, and the words seemed to tumble about inside her head without making any sense, so that when at last she did attempt to speak, all that came out of her throat was a strangled, groaning noise, like that of an animal in pain, and she pushed herself away from the table and out of the door, and stumbled up the stairs to her room.

She lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Soon it grew dark and still she lay there motionless.  But all within was a turmoil. She could feel something beating against the inside of her head and there was a constant rushing noise like a great storm that threatened to sweep her away. And then the beating sound became that of her own fists as they had beat down upon the lid of her husband’s coffin with everyone staring at her, and those curses and obscenities coming out of her mouth, and her neither caring nor able to stop. But then, without warning, she was beating at the lid from the inside of the coffin, trapped in there with his corpse,  and she was shouting for someone to come and let her out.

She woke with a start, not knowing what time it was, or where she was, and for a moment she believed she was back in her old home and she was filled with panic. The darkness of the room was suffocating and she had the impression that just before she had awoken someone had been standing beside the bed, leaning over her. She sat up. She was still in her clothes. They felt damp and sticky and her limbs were stiff. Facing her was the window, its curtains pulled back. A few stars showed in the night sky. Her breathing grew easier and she began to feel calm. After a little while she felt able to rest her feet on the floor. Then she pushed herself up heavily from the bed and went over to the window.

There was the rowan tree, lit by the bright light of the three-quarter moon standing directly above it. The whole garden was lit, and seemed to her suddenly a place where anything might happen. She felt, in fact, that something was about to happen, and she was excited and apprehensive at the same time.  She felt giddy and clutched with her fingers at the window-edge to keep herself steady. Her body trembled with anticipation.

Then the tree began to dance. It swayed from side to side, lithe, supple movements that rippled like liquid, its berries and deep-gold leaves flickering like warm flames in the night air. She could feel those swaying movements inside her and, without really realising it, she began to move herself, rocking from side to side at the window as before her, down there on the lawn, the girl who lived inside the tree stepped out from her prison to dance with delicate steps across the grass. Her long red hair flowed out behind her and the music she danced to was a tune once heard long ago in childhood and had been forgotten until now. The music rippled and swayed inside her as she swirled with flowing movements across the lawn, feeling the cool, damp grass beneath her feet, and the soothing light of the moon falling across her face and naked shoulders, and she could feel too the accumulated burdens of her life slipping from her, all the troubles and losses and sorrows, all the jealousies and broken promises, everything that kept her rooted and fastened to this world breaking free and tumbling away like so much jettisoned baggage, so that in her dancing she became weightless, a being woven solely of air and light and music.

Her son-in-law was making his way across the landing to the lavatory when he heard strange sounds coming from the old woman’s bedroom. He pushed open the door and looked in to see her standing at the window with her eyes closed, rocking backwards and forwards and moaning to herself. He stood for a moment, watching her, not quite knowing what to do, then went across and rested his hand gently on her shoulder and led her back to bed. He sat beside her, until he was sure she was calm and settled, then began to take his arm away so that he could go and tell his wife what had happened. But at that moment she turned and stared at him with eyes wide and a face twisted with hatred and fear, and she beat at him with her fists and her head shook and there were gargling sounds coming from her throat. Then she began to scream.

Litro Magazine

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