Summerwater Sarah Moss (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📖

cushion, never seen without lipstick and foundation in thirty years of neighbourliness, turned out she’d been at it with Alan’s boss for years, up to all sorts Mary hadn’t even heard of until Jeannie next door told her. There’s no reason, really, why high standards in make-up and housework should indicate high standards of morality, after all don’t we all go deeper than mascara and folded towels, but still. Not that Mary approves, not that she really considers that sort of thing admirable, better to splash paint or take up cycling or even sell up and buy a ruined farmhouse out in the hills and spend ten years rewiring and plastering and plumbing like the McVeys than ruin your marriage for a man no more handsome or interesting than your husband, and honestly in Mary’s view after a few years no one’s going to be more handsome or interesting than your husband; setting aside the violent and deranged, getting married is like voting in that whatever you choose the outcome will be at best mildly unsatisfactory four years down the line. Anyway, turns out most people don’t express their secret selves on paper but draw exactly what you’d expect from looking at them, you could see someone on a bus and make a perfectly accurate assumption about her artistic tendencies, which is why she needs the thing. The whatsit. She likes to get things right. She doesn’t want to improvise around mistakes, she wants it done properly in the first place. And it was here, it was definitely here, and now it’s not, and she never loses things, never ever, and it can’t have just vanished, it’s not as if there are children or even a cat to move things around.

She knows it’s not in her handbag, there’s no reason it would be and she’s already looked twice, but she’s now, she thinks, into the ritual phase of looking for something. Leaning on the back of her chair as she passes, she carries the handbag over to the table. Her younger self would have upended it, let everything cascade over the tablecloth. Maybe her younger self would have painted differently too, but she’ll never know what she might have done if she hadn’t been a doctor’s wife and the mother of Melissa and Marcus. She pulls out a chair and sits down, and David, reading a book on the future of the country in his armchair, looks up and asks what she’s doing. You mind your own business, she wants to say, but she says, oh, just going through my bag, it’s getting a bit heavy. Looking for the thing. Looking for the word for the thing. He’d only worry, or take her off to the doctor, and they can’t do anything, can they, about – well, about this kind of thing. If that’s what it is.

He grunts and looks out of the window. She thinks he’s not really all that interested in that book, which looks to be another five-hundred-page lump by another – what’s the word – preposterous, propensity, no, the other one, wealthy, well off, ha, prosperous, that’s it, another prosperous and preposterous Englishman about how the world is ending because no one’s doing what the writer thinks they ought to do, learning obsolete words for insects or scrubbing floors on their hands and knees with wooden brushes or exposing babies to germs, usually something the writer imagines that women or the lower orders did before he was born. She doesn’t know why David goes on buying them. Keeps the old brain ticking over, he says, as if hers isn’t, as if all that walking about in the rain and reading tedious books will stop him getting old and dying like everyone else. Anyway, she can’t sit about here all day. Why is her handbag on the table, she doesn’t like bags on tables, not once they’ve been on the floors of cafés and ferries and even public loos, you wouldn’t put your shoes on the dinner table, would you? She stands up slowly and leans on the table while the cabin around her tilts, wobbles. It’s not dramatic, the way the earth moves lately. There are no earthquakes or bombs, just an instability, as if all the surfaces are delicately balanced and easily tipped. The children had toys like that, Weebles, they were called, egg-shaped people about three inches tall and you could force them all the way down to the ground and they’d spring up lurching from side to side and eventually sway themselves upright. Like one of those things that hangs from a big clock, the ticker.

She takes the handbag over to her armchair and bends her knees to put it on the floor, which is one of the places she might think to look next time she wants it. It’s not easy, standing up again, even holding on to the chair back. Things aren’t always exactly where she thinks they are these days, as if everything is out of the corner of her eye, as if her hands and feet are guessing a bit. Outside, she sees, down by the water, there’s that nice family staying in number five, the baby boy and the little girl with about the same gap as Marcus and Melissa. She and David hadn’t bought the cabin then, not until David’s dad died when Marcus was four – well, the cabins weren’t even built, the holiday park was just woodland like everywhere up here though the pub is old, her dad remembered walking up to the pub while the road was still a track and the deliveries came by boat. Did they go on holiday, when the children were so young? She doesn’t think so, just family visits, mostly her parents because they could see David’s every Sunday anyway, and David not always with them. He used to work so hard. She took the children on the train, she remembers it now, and prams were so big in