Celia

by Graham Mort

HE LOVED THE WAY SHE washed in the mornings. Stooping at the bathroom sink in stripy pyjamas. Scooping water into her face and shaking her head. Dabbing her temples like a cat. Her cleft chin, her dimples. Working little fingers into her ears, then burying her face in a towel. Then frowning over the top at him where he lay in bed, watching, her, feeling lucky. Feeling alive.

The sink was an old one with big chromium taps, the brass showing through. The flat had a Baby Belling cooker and an ancient gas fire where flames glowed blue and orange behind old fashioned mantles. They had an oriental look, like the twist on temple columns. Like the hidden part of prayer. He loved her small shoes, lined up under the bed. The way she squirmed into a pair of jeans, buttoning the flies like a boy. The way she didn’t use make up, but glossed her lips from a tube of salve and flicked out her eyelashes with the little brush from a tube of mascara. 

She had pierced ears and liked to wear silver pendants that swayed under her short dark hair. Dark hair when everyone else wanted to be blonde. At first, he thought she was Spanish, but when the summer tan faded, he could see that she was Irish through and through, her skin creamy white, a smattering of freckles across her arms and nose. Irish, but her ancestors had been shipwrecked when the Armada foundered. Sailors smuggled ashore and hidden by the local girls who took pity on them. Legends, myths.

They slept in a three-quarters bed, rolling into each other, sharing their snores and breath. He liked to feel her breasts through the cotton pyjamas and she’d play with his curls, or run the heel of her hand over the stubble on his chin. He was usually the first to wake, watching her surface from sleep with that look of faint dismay. As if she really wanted to be unconscious, to be in a world of dreams.

Most days he felt lucky. Some days he couldn’t believe his luck as she moved under him, letting out that little groan from her throat. Then their children, two scrub-haired boys. Then a job he hated but needed. Then a fling with someone at work, which was a big mistake. It took them a long time to get over it. By this time Celia had little lines running down from her mouth. She’d ask him why sometimes. Why he’d done what he’d done. He never knew what to say. Except that he loved her. He loved her more than ever. He wanted a kind of forgiveness that he couldn’t ask for. 

They were good Catholics and went to Mass with the boys each Sunday. Their sons became altar boys, singing in white vestments with closed eyes. Angelic. At midnight Mass they turned to their neighbours and gave the sign of peace. After the hiatus, Celia stopped going to confession. That wasn’t her sin, after all, so not for discussion. Then she gradually drifted away from the church when their boys were teenagers. But Stefan stuck at it as if practice could make perfect. Or better, he’d say, just better.

As for the children, she had a poster of a rainbow on the kitchen wall with part of a poem by Kahlil Gibran. There was a space under the rainbow where you could stick a picture of your own kids and there were Tom and Ben with their gappy teeth. Your children are not your children./They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. She’d got the poster from the NSPCC shop. Then, when they were teenagers, two police officers brought the boys home in a patrol car after a fight with other boys at the local park. It’s not the end of the world, Stefan said. And she could have sworn he winked at them. When the police left, Celia tore the poster down and turned to them. You will do what you’re bloody well told! Each word pounded on the table top. Pure rage.No one really knew where that had come from. Terrified at the time, the boys they dined out on it for years afterwards.

He loved her most when she was beyond sixty, potting up sweet peas in the greenhouse, her fingers in compost. When they made love, he left his glasses on the bedside cabinet and she was that girl again. The one who’d washed like a cat in their first flat. But he was different. He couldn’t quite say how. Lying beside her as the sun set fire to the curtains and bubbles clung inside a glass of water beside the bed. Different how? Different where? Inside himself? Something had slowly changed. And maybe for the better, like bedrock melting. Like the lava lamp they kept in a corner of their bedroom and left on through the night so that the room flickered with shadows.

He still wanted her, but desire was different now. I took its time and they did. Taking their time to wake up. Enjoying a cup of tea that he made in their hand-painted kitchen and carried upstairs precariously, his bare feet feeling the pleasure of coir matting pressing against them. They’d sit up in bed listening to the eight o’clock news, shaking their heads, making the odd comment. Then she’d touch his elbow. Or he’d take off her glasses gently and kiss the lobes of her ears. She liked that. And she liked the feeling of his hands against her belly where she’d carried their children. 

Of course her hair was white now. It’d gone grey in her early thirties. She’d used hair dye for a time, replenishing what was fading. The roots showed after a few days, which was annoying. She was almost fifty when she grasped the nettle and let it go. Then it was no longer grey, but startling white. A marked contrast to her eyebrows, which remained dark. Their boys teased her about that and she pretended she didn’t care. She didn’t, she said. She didn’t.

Then they retired within three months of each other. They had their own house now, of course, in a small town in Hertfordshire. Part of an Edwardian terrace, named after some battle in the Boer War that everyone had forgotten. It had a long garden that reached down to a little stream. Then open fields where horses grazed, stooping between thistles. Sometimes they heard them galloping in the night, or thought they did. Sometimes it was owls calling back and forth. They didn’t always sleep, but lay inside their thoughts.

His own hair had thinned out and he’d let it grow almost to shoulder length. You could see the shape of his head when the light was behind him. It wasn’t white yet, but a silvery blonde, as if it could never decide. Celia had never been sure about that, twisting it into ringlets to annoy him as they lay awake and the traffic outside died into the night. He grew a beard that she never really liked. The way it tickled her and hid his cheekbones, which she’d always considered rather fine.

Life is good! He said that once after eating the dinner she’d cooked, leaning back in his chair to hold up his glass of wine. Celia thought that was just silly. In fact, the most stupid thing she’d ever heard. What about all the wars they’d lived through? Biafra, Vietnam, The Gulf Wars, Libya, Sudan, the war on Gaza? What about famines and climate change, the way the oceans were rising and washing the world’s population westwards clinging to the wreckage of their lives? She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. Let him be in the moment. Any moment.

They had grandchildren now, one from each son. A girl and a boy, so they felt they were held in a kind of symmetry. Sometimes, they took them to school in the mornings. Sometimes, they came for tea or they looked after them for a weekend to let their parents off the leash. They had a fridge covered in primary school artwork and alphabet fridge magnets that Celia liked to arrange into make-believe words that the children identified as wild creatures. Snogrids and Pronfews and Quinters that prowled their imaginations and became the subject of bedtime stories that Stefan told them.

Oh, didn’t I say that he was Polish and had come over from Krakow to learn English on one of those short-term courses? That he’d bumped into Celia in a bar near the canal in Camden Town? He’d tipped his drink onto her summer frock, standing up to let her get to the bar.  Of course, he apologized. Awkwardly. She came out in a deep blush, as if it was all her fault. But she liked his accent, the other language inside him. Which made their boys bilingual. Celia did her best to learn the basics of Polish. Enough to get by with his parents who had only ever visited England once. 

What did she think about when Stefan had finally fallen asleep? He’d broken her heart and she had to put it back together. She’d carried on loving him, but in a different way. Because things change and stay the same. Things are compromised or just become political in the end. Things had to be negotiated. No one asked her what she felt. She asked herself things. Was she happy? Maybe. And sometimes that was all she knew about how to be happy. How tentative feelings were.

When Stefan died it was from a pancreatic tumour, a carcinoma, if she gave it a  proper name. Celia nursed him. Sitting up at night. Listening. Changing sheets in the morning. Feeding him water from a special cup. Then a spoon when he could hardly swallow. Soothing him when he tried to climb out of the hospital bed they’d installed in a downstairs room. He looked unwell for months, gradually losing weight. They took him into hospital for a procedure to drain fluid from his abdomen. When he came home he was gaunt. His eyes had the luminous look she’d seen in pictures of saints, his nose the aquiline contour of an aristocrat above the beard. It was a step change. Terminal.

Stefan wanted a priest. She got him one. Why not? She lingered by the living room door, hearing them talk. The low drone of the priest, the broken whisper of Stefan’s voice. Sometimes he forgot English and spoke in Polish. Especially at night when he was delirious. He died on a September morning when the leaves were turning and the air was full of change. One moment he was breathing, the next everything had gone into a long slow sigh, as if the world was exhaling.

Celia left him, putting on a cardigan  to walk in the garden, to gather herself. Each day more summer warmth was fading from the air. There were honey bees in the last of the sweet peas and foxgloves she’d let grow all over the borders. The horses were grazing between dock and purple thistles. Shaking insects from their manes, flicking their tails. There were wagtails and dragonflies haunting the stream that glinted like fragments of a broken mirror.

Celia went back to sit with Stefan, closing his eyes and crossing his hands as she’d done for her mother and father. He looked peaceful now. At last. Perhaps a little angry that he’d died. She took off her wedding ring and put it back on again. She thought about drawing the curtains, but left them open. Then she rang the boys with the news that was no news, dropping the receiver back into its cradle. Into the silence. She couldn’t cry. Try as she might, she could never explain why. Even to herself. Except that tears were one thing and love was another.

oOo

Graham Mort lives in North Yorkshire, UK. He is emeritus professor of Creative Writing at Lancaster University and writes poetry and short fiction. He was winner of the Bridport short story prize in 2007. His short story collection, ‘Touch’ (Seren, 2010) won the Edge Hill prize in 2011. His collections, ‘Terroir’ (Seren, 2015) and ‘Like Fado’ (Salt, 2021) were both longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. 
Connect at grahammort.com