Bread and Chocolate Read online

  The washing machine must work through the night on cheap rate electricity. The central heating system is his, it switches itself off as he departs in the morning, and comes on only as he arrives home at night. I sometimes think that the house is applauding his return. The boiler gives a little ‘huff’ and roars into life half an hour before I hear his key in the lock. The house readies itself for the return of the owner.

  ‘It’s a waste to heat the whole house all day when you only use the kitchen,’ he tells me. As the house cools around me all day I cling to the little convector heater in the kitchen and make little sorties into the cold bedrooms to Hoover and wipe down and dust.

  The telephone too is his; I rob him every time I make a call. I telephone only when he is out of the house, and I put down the receiver when I hear his car in the drive. To see me start at the sound of the boiler coming on and quickly finish my call would make anyone would think that I am keeping a secret; but I am not. The only secret is that sometimes I need to hear my own voice. Sometimes I long to hear myself talk and laugh and gossip as if I were happy. As if it were my telephone and I had friends to call.

  He knows that I use it when he is out of the house. He has put a timer beside it. I am supposed to turn the dial to 3 every time I make a local call. I am not supposed to make any national calls until after midday, or preferably after six. ‘If you must phone your sister, do it at the weekend,’ my husband says when he opens the telephone bill. Then he always says as a joke the slogan they use on children’s programmes when they invite children to call in: ‘Always get permission from whoever pays the bill.’

  When I first saw the house, with the low sweeping branches of the untouched wood overhanging the rich churned earth, I thought we had bought a house in the forest, with trees within touching distance of my door. But he hired a chain saw and amputated them one Saturday morning, working without a break from quarter to nine till after one, in a frenzy of noise, in a cloud of dim blue exhaust fumes, while one branch after another tore, split, fell.

  He piled the wood into a pyre on the poisoned earth, soaked it with petrol from the chainsaw – ‘No reason to give them back the unused fuel!’ he said cleverly – and burned it all, burned it all up, until there was nothing but a pile of pale woodash, soft as talcum powder, and nothing left of the trees but white scarred limbs where the branches had once bent low and whispered with their leaves to the grasses and the little hidden flowers.

  I closed the door against the haunting scent of wood-smoke. It stung my eyes and made them as red as if I had been crying for the trees which I thought would blow gently around my new house.

  My husband is a great one for his garden. He never will let me touch a thing, and when the trees were wounded, the ground poisoned, when the wild flowers drooped their scarred heads and wilted, and the thick plastic tub of the lily pond was lowered into place, then I felt I did not want to touch his garden. I did not want to sit in his garden, I felt as if the dead earth beneath the concrete mock-cobble finish had died of some disgusting injury, like gangrene from a rotting limb. And as it slowly died, something of my pallid spirit died too.

  He tried to tempt me with his shoddy chairs. With his blow-away dining table, with his twin-wheeled barbecue set. ‘Come and see the lily pond, it looks a picture!’

  I went to see. It was easier than saying ‘no’. There were two ominous watery growths in small plastic crates. Their roots trailed like sly watersnakes across the azure floor of the pond. ‘Put a couple of koi carp in there,’ my husband says proudly. ‘Think how they’ll look!’

  I know how they will look. They will gaze up at me; their goggling bemused eyes wide and despairing. They will swim round and round their plastic prison, finning through the grasping roots of the lily plants. I do not think I can bear it, to share the poisoned garden with two prisoners. But I say nothing. The garden is his.

  Now he buys plants. Rack upon rack of bedding plants he buys from the garden centre and brings them home like kidnapped children, alien force-bred seedlings, each in a polystyrene pot like strange lonely growths from a science lab. He taps them out into his hand, and crushes them into the flowerbed, one and then another, and another. When he comes in for his tea I look out of the patio window and see another little row of helpless soldiers, marching along the strict line of grass. Limp and lost.

  I have taken to straying.

  A gap opened up in his fence. It is behind his potting shed and he has not yet seen it. Some dog in the night has wriggled between two newly creosoted six-by-five panels of fencing, and left a gap. I am thin, as thin as a child now, and I can bend the fence back and slide through. In the afternoons, when I should be ironing his shirts that have washed all night and danced on the scaffold of the dryer all morning, I bend back the fence, and slip through and out to the woodland.

  It is only a small wood. Our housing estate encroaches on the west side, to the south are fenced fields and then the town. To the east and north there are roads and houses. But it is a very old wood. The trees are thick-trunked, mossy, tall. There is a yew tree with branches as lush as a jungle, blackly green. There are oak trees with mangled craggy bark; there are beech trees, half a dozen within whispering distance of each other. The silver birches shiver their heart-shaped leaves, in every corner. There are many birds, they whisper and sing in secret places. The forest floor is soft with dried leaves, mossy by the drainage ditch that is full of stagnant water and wriggling life. And in the heart of this little wood, where no-one walks but me, where there are no paths but the faint print of my house slippers on rustling leaves, in the heart of this little wood there is a fallen tree where I lie on my back, stretch out and look up through the branches to the sky.

  ‘Where were you this afternoon?’ he asks at teatime. ‘I telephoned you, I needed the Bullens’ address.’

  ‘In the garden,’ I say quickly, without thinking.

  ‘You didn’t touch anything, did you?’ he asks, immediately anxious. ‘I have a plan for all the plants. You have to keep on top of a garden, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t touch anything,’ I say.

  I look past him to the garden through the patio window. He has planted gladioli and iris in strict painful rows and their little green heads are pushing through the earth, viewing the close-mowed grass, and the marching ranks of the limp-leafed bedding plants.

  ‘What it is to be a lady of leisure!’ he says like a joke. But it is not a joke. He will be watching now, for some chore left undone. He spends the evening looking around the room, and he is triumphant when at bedtime he thinks he has caught me out.

  ‘I need black socks for tomorrow,’ he beams. ‘I always wear black socks on Fridays, to go with my black suit. Branch meeting on Fridays, I always wear my black suit.’

  ‘They’re airing,’ I say. ‘They’ll be ready tomorrow morning.’

  He gives a short laugh. ‘All that lazing around in the afternoon,’ he says. ‘And now we see who pays the price!’

  I smile as if I believe he is joking. His face is sharp, like a keen little rodent. ‘Did you bring the cushions in?’ he asks suddenly. ‘After you had finished sitting in my garden? Did you bring the cushions in and put them in the right place in the cupboard under the stairs?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. In my mind I can see the flutter of the green leaves of the beech trees as they interlaced the sky above my upturned face. The sunlight flickered through them into my eyes; it was as green as leaves, that light. But when I closed my eyes against its brightness there were circling moons of blood red on my eyelids.

  He goes to the bathroom with a magazine. I know by this that he is moving his bowels and he will be there for a long time.

  When he flushes the handle and comes out the seat will be intimately warm and the air will smell stale and old. I sit and wait on the edge of the bed until he has finished in the bathroom. Even the time that I may sleep is dictated by him.

  I wake in the night with a start. The curtains have parted and the mo