I turn my back on that bureau. But it still stares at me – stares and stares out of the mirror.
I turn the mirror to face the wall.
Some weeks later, I hear Mum puffing upstairs. She puffs more than the removal men, because of carrying the weight of the babies all curled together inside her. And also the weight of the worry they are causing.
“Jess,” she says, stopping by my door.
“Yes?”
“Jess – I wish you could have had the piano too.”
And that makes me want to cry, the way things do when you think nobody understands but actually they do.
The next day my friend Zoe comes round.
Zoe is a dancer. She doesn’t have the body of a dancer; she’s not slim and poised. In fact she’s quite big, big-boned, and increasingly, curvy. But when she dances you think it is what she was born to do. I love watching Zoe dance. When Zoe dances she’s like me with the piano – nothing else exists, she loses herself in it.
Otherwise, we’re not really very alike at all. She’s loud and I’m quiet. She’s funny and I’m not. And she likes boys. Mum says that it’s because, even though we’re in the same year at school, she’s the best part of twelve months older than me and it makes a difference. Mum says it’s also to do with the fact that she’s the youngest child in their family.
Soon I will not be the youngest child in our family.
I will no longer be an only child.
Si says, “Girls grow up too fast these days.”
And I don’t ask him what he means by this or whether he’d prefer Zoe (I’ve a feeling he doesn’t like Zoe that much) to go back to wearing a Babygro, because this will only start A Discussion.
I have other friends of course – Em, Alice – but it’s Zoe I see most often, not least because she lives at the bottom of our cul-de-sac, so she just waltzes up and knocks on our door.
Like today.
Then she pounds up the stairs and bursts into my room. Sometimes I think I’ll ask her if it’s possible for her to come into a room so quietly no one would notice her, which is something I’m quite good at. But I’m not sure she’d understand the task, which is another reason why I like her.
“Hi, hi, hi. Hi!” says Zoe. She wheels about, or tries to, which is when she comes face to face with the desk.
“What,” she says, “is that?!”
“It’s a bureau,” I say.
“A what?”
“A bureau.”
“But what’s it doing here?”
“It belonged to my aunt Edie.”
“It’s hideous,” she says. “And ancient.”
Ancient is one of her favourite words. Anything more than two weeks old is ancient as far as Zoe is concerned.
“It’s George III,” I say. Si again.
“Hideous, ancient and pre-owned. Who’d want something that already belonged to some George whatever?” she says.
I’m going to explain that George Whatever didn’t own this piece of furniture, that he just happened to be on the throne of England when it was made, but that would turn me into Si, so I don’t.
“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and bashed up,” she continues.
Bashed up?
I actually take a look at the desk. It’s not bashed up. And the wood isn’t as dark as I’d thought either, in fact it’s a pale honey colour, and the grain is quite clear so, even though it’s over two hundred and fifty years old you can still imagine the tree from which it was originally cut. There are dents in the surface of course and scratches too, but it doesn’t look bashed up, just as though it has lived a little, lived and survived.
“It’s not bashed up,” I say.
“What?”
“And it’s not hideous. Look at the locks,” I say. “Look at the handles.”
The locks and the handles are also not as I’d thought. They’re not heavy, not funereal, in fact they’re quite delicate. Around the keyholes are beautiful little curls of brass in the shape of leaves and even the little brass-headed nails that hold the handles in place are carefully banged in to just look like part of the pattern.
“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and IN THE WAY,” says Zoe. She pirouettes. “I mean, how is a person to dance in this room any more?”
Then she sees the mirror turned against the wall.
“And what’s this?” she says. “Are you having a bad face day?”
She hangs the mirror the correct way round and checks to see if she has any spots, which of course she doesn’t. Even when she gets to be a proper teenager I doubt if she’ll have spots. Things like that don’t happen to Zoe.
“I’m sorry about the dancing, Zo,” I say. “But I really like this bureau. In fact,” I add, experimenting, “I think I love it.”
“Huh?” says Zoe, who’s still searching for spots.
Sometimes I think Zoe is a mirror. I look into her to find out who I really am.
As soon as Zoe leaves (flamboyant twirl and a shout of Bye-eee as she flies down the stairs), I take my chair and sit at the desk.
I never saw Aunt Edie at this desk, as I saw her so often at the piano. But she must have sat here, I realise. Sat writing letters, private things, not things you do when you have guests in the house. I pull out the runners (and Si is right about this, it isn’t difficult at all) and lay down the lid.
Inside it is like a little castle. In the middle, there is a small arched doorway, the door itself hinged between two tiny carved wooden pillars. On either side of the door are stepped shelves and cubbyholes of different sizes, to store envelopes or paper, I suppose. There are also four drawers, two wide shallow ones next to the pillars, and at either edge of the desk two narrower, longer ones. The desktop itself slides away if you pull a little leather tab. Underneath is a cavernous little underdrawer.
“That’s where they would have kept the inkwells,” says Si in passing.
I can see dark stains which could have been ink. People writing at this desk long before Aunt Edie. I imagine a quill pen scratching out a love letter. And suddenly those faraway people who sat at this desk, family or strangers, they don’t seem so faraway at all. They seem joined to me by the desk and all the things that have been written and thought here. And then I think about Edie herself, and how maybe she loved this desk. Sun-bright Edie, maybe coming here to be quiet, to be still, to unfurl her own dark heart.
Then I know I want to claim this desk after all.
But I still don’t put anything in the desk. Not until the morning my mother is to deliver the babies. This is going to be a long day, a difficult day. “We’ll need to keep busy,” Gran says; “you and me.”
Gran has agreed to stay in the house with me so that Si can be in the operating theatre with Mum.
“It’s an elective caesarean, Jess,” says Si. “The operation itself is quite safe.”
They have to go in the night before, as Mum is first on the list. Si stands in the hall holding Mum’s suitcase.