Veronica
George had already left for work when from the window of their new kitchen-come-living room, Veronica spotted a boy emerging from the house next door. It had been exactly two hours and six minutes since the music had finally stopped. She had been listening intently ever since, hoping for reassuring kitchen clatters or other proofs of life; but she had not yet heard the voice of the woman, nor the sound of a baby. Still, here was a boy. A scrawny thing like his mother, she would have guessed he was eight or nine from the height of him, but his gait suggested otherwise, all self-consciousness and measure, far more befitting of a pre-teen. Most adults blundered at attempts to estimate the age of children, forgetting, in the stretch between now and their own childhoods, the minute, invisible, colossal developments that separate a Reception child from a Year 1, and an eight-year-old from a boy knocking on eleven. But at her last school, Veronica had taught ten- and eleven-year-olds, so she was familiar with the gradual creep of adolescence into the frame. At her new school, the youngest in the class would still be six.
Veronica watched as, on the other side of the road now, the boy pulled a packet of crisps from his bag and ate the first few while staring up at the top floors of his house. Veronica wondered what he was looking for. A wave from his mother perhaps. A sign of something. She followed his line of sight, but didn’t have the angle, and after a moment, the boy turned and scurried along the road, a peculiar mixture of anxiety and machismo. Veronica wondered where he was going. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was only seven-thirty – too early for school, and besides, no reason to make him so shifty – yet every few steps he glanced around. Nobody crossed his path, however, and soon, he was round the corner and gone. Veronica stopped munching her toast and listened again. The downstairs neighbour next door had left even earlier than George. He seemed to run some sort of roofing company and had loaded up his van a full thirteen minutes before their alarm was set to wake them. She had been watching the street, first from the bedroom and now from here, ever since. If the woman had left, it was improbable that she would have missed seeing her. But why then was the house next door so quiet? Even if the adults were asleep, surely the baby would have stirred. While pressing her head against the window for a better view, it occurred to Veronica that she need not be so invested. The neighbours had most likely existed at their abode long before she and George had arrived on the street, and for all she knew, the noises they had made were normal, or consensual at least. Perhaps then she should be less concerned with their internal dynamic and more with the impact of their noise upon them – her and George.
Neither had yet dared to voice it, but the horrific noise of the previous night had been a devastating disappointment: the idyllic home far from idyllic, George’s hard-earned savings invested foolishly, the new start tainted already. Yes, this is what should be occupying Veronica’s mind. But as she sipped her coffee and picked again at her toast, she couldn’t stop picturing the visuals that might have accompanied the sounds – the woman against their adjoining wall, the baby unattended. Why was the child not crying now? Where was its mother? Veronica looked at her watch again and tapped her fingers impatiently against the window, subconsciously scratching her thigh. She would have to leave for her new job soon. It might not be possible for her to determine what had happened after the sounds had ceased.
Moving her plate and mug to the sink, Veronica gave them a quick rinse before loading them into the new Miele dishwasher. There was something acutely satisfying about these tiny gestures of homeliness. She and George had lived together for almost four years now in various rented flats, and before that she had house-shared in a lovely maisonette in Chelsea. All were sufficiently homely, but all were launch pads rather than bases, and she’d rarely stayed inside any of them long enough to make a meal, let alone do the washing up. She couldn’t remember ever seeing her own mother do the dishes. This isn’t to say that she didn’t do them – her father would never have found himself in the kitchen and they didn’t have a maid in every country they lived in, so her mother must have washed up sometimes. But Veronica didn’t have a visual memory of this. She couldn’t picture her at the sink. She couldn’t conjure images of a roast cooking in the oven, or potato peelings littering the counter, or her mother letting her taste the bubbling Bolognese straight from the pan on a metal spoon that burned her tongue. Those were experiences she’d collected from other mothers, the mothers of friends who invited her sometimes for a bank holiday weekend, or Easter lunch, or for a three-week stint the last summer before everything altered.
Glancing again at her watch, Veronica flipped the dishwasher closed with her foot, and sprinted up the stairs to the bedroom where she planted herself in front of her newly filled wardrobe. There hung the red and the blue, but now she couldn’t seem to make a decision. Neither could she decide whether to tie her blonde hair into a proficient bun, or let it hang soft and loose. Or whether to invite the new parents she would be meeting into the classroom at the end of the day so that she could say a few words to the group, or stick to individual hellos and handshakes at the classroom door. The itching of her legs was incessant.
Veronica closed her eyes and pushed her hand towards the competing materials. Red. She switched to blue.
Veronica had chosen to cycle to her new job. Boarding in Kent, she had biked into the nearby village upright, without holding onto the handlebars, and pretended to her friends that this skill came naturally, but really it was from two formative years during primary school spent in Holland. Today’s cycle was an easy two miles away in St John’s Wood. She knew the route already, though not as well as her mother supposed. Veronica still wrote, and received, a weekly letter from her mother. In the last one, her mother had mused that now Veronica was living back in North London, she would of course remember the old house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the walks on the Heath, and did she know that the school she was teaching at was just a road away from the music academy they’d driven to every Saturday for violin lessons? Veronica didn’t remember any of this. They’d lived in the Hampstead house for little over a year. But she’d been to the school three times now – two interviews, and one lengthy induction day at which she’d been thoroughly introduced to the campus. It was not hyperbole to call it a campus. Despite being a stone’s throw from Central London, the school boasted its own playing field, a swimming pool, and grand old buildings that reminded Veronica of the similarly grand institutions of her own childhood, filling her with the immediate sense of greeting a long lost relative. Familiarity, however, did not provide her with the easy confidence she might have presumed.
As she pushed away the unsteadiness in her stomach and unlocked her bike, Veronica considered this. There was a time when she would have swept into a new position, charming the men, captivating the women. She should, now, have been sweeping through the pretty Primrose streets. But at the first traffic light she stopped too abruptly and almost came off over the handlebars, and she physically felt her legs wobbling. As she arrived, she saw already a small group of elbows-out parents huddled together many minutes before the ringing of the bell. One of them spotted her, and pointed.
Her nerves were, however, unnecessary, as far as the children went at least, turning out to be a delightful balance between respectful and precocious.