Gloves

The first one is yellow — a child’s, knitted, with a small hole chewed through the thumb. Tessa finds it draped across the top of the bird table as she stands in the garden in the early morning sunshine, the scent of honeysuckle heavy and cloying. She picks it up and turns it over. Odd, to find a winter glove, on a day that promises so much heat. It reminds her of the gloves her mother knitted for her as a child, the ones she lost, or left stuffed in her desk drawer at school, until her mother threaded them through her coat sleeves with wool. It’s damp with morning dew. She wonders how it got there.

She‘s smoking her first cigarette of the day, the one she has before her twin daughters wake. 

She looks across the gardens to the village, shimmering in a haze; the roofs glint. It’s so quiet here, after the cacophony of the city; so quiet and the air is so clean she can taste the scent of flowers, the scent of damp earth. This place has won the Prettiest Village in East Sussex Award three times in the last ten years. A better place to bring up the girls, Mike had said, and she’d agreed, although part of her balked at the thought of leaving the friends, the art galleries, the energy, the chance encounters on tube trains, the smell of London parks after rain. But as he’d pointed out, as a freelance proof-reader she mostly worked from home these days, and her friends and their families could always come and stay at weekends if they wanted, and he was abroad half the time for work, and the girls needed fresh air, and playing fields and walks along country lanes on summer mornings. And it was hardly his fault she’d managed to get those final three, fatal points on her license when she was flashed by a speed camera, and now she was stranded here, reliant on walking and taxis and the occasional offer of a lift from people she hardly knew when it was tipping down.

Today there is birdsong, and the faint, persistent hum from the by-pass. Hanging baskets burst crimson and blue with trailing Pelargoniums and lobelia. Today will be beautiful, she decides. Perfect. Once the girls are at school and she’s settled at her lap-top on the patio, she will click open her in-box, and Dougie’s latest message will be there, waiting for her. He’ll have sent it late last night, drinking his final whisky. She wraps her arms around her shoulders, thinking of what he’ll say, the words he’ll use to describe his latest fantasy.  When their e-mailing switched from being flirtatious to erotic, he’d called her his cyber-slut. These days he often rings as well, if Mike‘s away; he’s getting bolder. She likes it.

She finishes the cigarette and grinds the stub under her heel, stretches out her arms and feels the skin begin to blush in the warmth.

‘Come on,’ she urges them, ‘or we’ll be late.’ She moves around the irritating low-beamed, pine-clad kitchen restlessly, rinsing cups, wiping surfaces, already impatient for them to finish their cereal. The house is warm, stuffy, like an airing cupboard, even when she opens windows; she nurses a cup of tea and watches them, her scruffy, slow-moving girls. They are identical, constantly mistaken for each other, but she can always tell them apart; they both have her wild dark hair, Mike’s frank blue eyes, but Louise’s features  seem sharper, more vibrant. They have been up since seven, reluctant to wash or dress, squabbling passionately over whose turn it will be to go first on the Dancing Stage Euro Mix Mat when they come home from school. Neither of them has a clean dress, although she could have sworn she was finally on top of the laundry this week. She’s already sponged blue paint from Amy’s hem and orange juice from Louise’s collar.

 Amy lifts her spoon, drips milk onto the table and carefully draws a flower with her index finger.

‘Mum,’ says Louise indignantly, ’look, she’s doing that really gross thing

again —’

‘Just finish it, and come on.’  Tessa‘s aware she sounds waspish and unsympathetic.  ‘Let’s just try not to be late for once.’ She snatches up their bowls and spoons as they kick each other under the table. She wonders what Dougie is doing now, whether the early heat has seeped under his windows in the studio he sleeps and works in; whether he’s shaved, or his chin is sharp with black stubble. She wonders if he’s already up, stretching out a canvas, on his hands and knees, thinking of her.

The next one is on the front door-step — delicate turquoise silk, slightly faded, exquisitely embroidered in silver thread and tiny glass beads with dragon-flies — elbow length, with little silk-covered buttons. Tessa picks it up and marvels at the detail of the stitching. This is a glove hand-made for a rich woman with extraordinary clothes and accessories; a woman who was young in the thirties, perhaps, a whippet-thin woman who sipped cocktails and kept her cigarettes in a little tortoiseshell case. The sort of thing her grandmother would have worn, before the family business crashed and they’d had to sell the Kensington town-house and live modestly and bitterly in Peckham.

‘What’s that doing there?’ asks Amy.

‘I don’t know.’ Tessa smoothes it carefully. It smells of scent, something musky and expensive, not one she recognizes. ‘Someone must have dropped it.’

‘Why?’ asks Amy, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Mum, why?’

‘She said, she doesn’t know,’ says Louise, ‘but mum, why is there only one? Where’s the other one?’

‘I don’t know. No idea. Come on, for heaven’s sake -’ She takes it and marches down the path, drapes it over the privet hedge. Maybe it’s a joke, she thinks, maybe someone is leaving gloves as a joke. You never know in villages. Her friends had warned her, before she‘d left London; it takes years before you’re accepted. You have to be able to trace your family history back at least six generations before they’ll speak to you in the pub — apart from telling you the cottage you’ve bought is haunted, and has dry rot. She shoos the girls in front of her and walks as briskly as she can along the pavement. Already, she can feel the heat rising through the ground. The road is quiet this morning. Mary, her neighbour, a retired teacher in her sixties who seems to spend her life gardening, nods to her stiffly.

Tessa takes her daughters’ hands and they cross the road at the junction, onto the main high street. There are few other kids walking; most sail by in polished people-carriers, neat and serene, their faces scrubbed, intent on their junior laptops. She feels her chest prickle in the heat. She couldn’t find her sun glasses and the dazzling light from car bonnets and windows slices across her vision. They’ll be late again. The first time it happened, the teacher looked up from taking the register and gave her a small, tight smile. Nothing was said, but she felt the colour rise through her throat. These days she lets them go in on their own.

They walk past the row of shops and cafes and shops that service the village — Tessa chivvying, the girls dawdling. There’s the tea-shop with the white wooden blinds and bright splodgy paintings on the walls, selling brioche and lemon drizzle cake, cappuccino and skinny lattes and every type of herbal tea. The lime-washed gift shop selling glass angels, silver and magenta silk cushions and perfumed candles; the proper, old-fashioned butcher’s — (‘Look at that!’ Mike had exclaimed, when he first saw it, ‘isn’t that fantastic? We can get all our meat from there, free range. You don’t see many of those any more!’) — with pale, headless pigs sagging from hooks, sawdust on the floor and the metallic smell of blood, especially on a hot day like today; the up-market wine shop run by the short man who stares directly at her breasts whenever she goes in. She grips the girls’ hands tighter. She’ll get a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for later; the first glass will get her through her duty phone call from Mike. He always phones at seven when he’s away, speaks to the girls about  books they haven’t properly read and to Tessa about delayed meetings and decorating projects they might like to consider next time they get a clear weekend.

Then she sees it.

On the wine shop’s window-sill is a white latex glove, almost transparent and limp, like a spent featherlite. It reminds her of sex before children, and of the time she’d had her coil fitted. Legs up in stirrups, that‘s lovely, good girl; the smell of latex, the sick, cramping pain. Trying to float away from her body, up onto the ceiling. Just relax, they’d said, it‘s so much easier if you relax. Just fuck off, she’d wanted to reply.

She almost stops, and then doesn’t. It’s only a glove, she tells herself, just a stupid glove. It means nothing. Some piss-head leaving it there for a joke, some passing student. You get a lot of drinking in the country. Not much else to do.

Outside the school gates, crisply ironed mothers and au pairs stand around in the sunshine talking, having delivered their children cleanly and on time. As she hurries through, she notices a man’s black leather driving glove — it looks like expensive, supple, butter-soft leather — poking through the gate’s bars. Like half of the pair she bought Mike last Christmas.

‘Come on, girls -’ she barely has time to kiss them before they run into the cool of the cloakroom.

‘Mum, you forgot our sun-cream,’ says Amy. ‘We’re meant to slip, slap, slop when it’s sunny, otherwise we’ll burn and we might get cancer.’

Shit. Lax mother, badly prepared. More black marks. ‘Ask if you can borrow Tessa’s,’ she suggests meekly.

‘Don‘t take us in, mum,’ orders Louise, yanking up a sock, ‘stay there.’

She watches them as their classroom door opens and they are swallowed into their day. She has delivered them, done her duty, even if she messed up on sun cream and no doubt there‘ll be comments on their reports about punctuality. Today Dougie might ring at lunch-time, might ask her to go upstairs, draw the curtains against the harsh sun and undress herself slowly — ease each button from its fastening, pull down the zip of her skirt, unhook her bra, slide her knickers off and lie on the bed. ‘What a slut you are,’ he might say, as he often did, as he instructed her where and how to slide her fingers, ‘what a total, beautiful, delicious slut.’

The playground’s almost empty now. The bright sun casts solid shadows; by mid-morning the tarmac will be baking, softened by the heat. That’s why you need a school with proper playing fields, Mike had pointed out. She sits for a moment on a bench and closes her eyes; Dougie’s skin always tasted delicious to her, especially on a hot day — like caramel, like digestive biscuits. She wishes she saw him more often. She wishes she could taste him, now. She wishes she still lived a ten minute bus journey from him. Children need to feel grass underfoot, Mike had said. City schools, they’re not good places for kids. Dangerous. What sort of childhood do they get, in that environment? And all the stuff you get that goes along with all this multi-culturalism — it’s all very well, all very P.C., but look at the results. Look at all the distractions. All these kids who can’t speak English, who don’t really understand our culture. Our girls will thrive here.

She gets up slowly, and sees it. Under the bench is a fisherman’s glove — bright yellow, bulbous, stinking of mackerel and crusted with salt.

‘You want this wrapped?’  the wine shop man asks her breasts.

‘Please.’

As he wraps the bottle in pale pink tissue, she wishes there was somewhere she could sit down. She feels faint, even though it’s cool in the shop, and her legs feel weak. The fisherman’s glove is the strangest yet. No reason for it to be there, miles inland. Perhaps, she’d thought, turning it over in her hands, it was part of a school display, something to do with a seaside project, and it had been dropped by accident; but she knew, within seconds, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. It was a fishing glove, and somehow she knew it was Cornish. It brought back memories of holidays when she was a kid — all those airless car journeys, year after year, being squashed in the back of the Ford Escort, her brothers poking and nudging her from both sides, her mother chain-smoking Camel Lights in the front, periodically turning round and hissing they’d all get a good hiding and no holiday if they didn’t shut up. Her father driving, silent, his neck muscles rigid.

The cottage they always rented in Mevagissy. The smell of salt in the wind, the grey-white foam frilling over her feet as she pulled her socks and shoes off and ran into the sea for the first time — icy enough to take her breath away. The fishermen, selling mackerel off their boats; mackerel for tea, almost every night. ‘It’s so good for you, full of vitamins and oils, mackerel,’ said her mother, sizzling it viciously in a frying pan, tipping it onto their plates, the skin blackened, not eating any herself.

‘Five pounds thirty, please,’ the short man says loudly, and she realises he‘s probably repeating the request. She pays, thanks him and slips the bottle into her bag. Outside the sun is almost blinding. Just get home, she tells herself, and start some work; forget the gloves, leave Dougie till later; that copy for the pharmaceutical company news-sheet should have been in days ago. She breathes more easily. The air, despite the traffic, is scented with Pelargoniums.  It will be fine, she tells herself, you are just stressed, not surprising. Today will be fine.

As she crosses the road, she sees it; half way across — squashed, she guesses, from the impact of several tyres. A crimson velvet glove, the fingers splayed. Elbow length, like the one of the gloves Dougie made her wear the first time he painted her.

Mary, her neighbour, is smiling stiffly. She clips her hedge, and her forehead gleams with perspiration. She looks annoyed.

‘Lovely day,’ says Tessa. Her voice seems to be coming from a long way off. From the sky, perhaps, where an occasional small silver aeroplane scratches across the bright blue surface; from deep in the ground, where the worms are churning.

‘Lovely,‘ agrees Mary, flicking tiny fragments of crushed leaf from her secateurs. ‘I just wondered, Tessa — there was a little glove, this morning, on my doorstep — black net, lacy -  it’s not — I just wondered if it was yours?’

Tessa leans against the hedge. ’No,’ she says, ’no, I haven’t got any like that. I don’t really have any gloves. I mean, I do. For winter. That’s all.’

‘Are you all right?’ asks Mary, staring at her. ‘You’re a bit pale. Would you like-’

‘I’ve got to go in.’ Tessa fumbles for the door key. It’s too hot today, too bright; the sun is affecting her, she’s not herself. She can hear the phone ringing, in the hallway; gets there just in time. It’s stuffy inside, dust motes dancing in the bright air, and as soon as she hears his voice, she feels damp and limp.

‘What I’d like, you sexy slut,’ says Dougie, ‘is for you to tell me exactly what you’re wearing. Start with your earrings. Start there.’

‘My silver hoops,’ she says automatically, walking through the hallway with the receiver. ‘And the two little studs — actually, this isn’t a good time — why are you so early, I‘m only just back -’

‘I can’t sleep,’ he says. ‘I can’t sleep and I can’t work. I lie there in the dark and I think of your tits all night. And your hands. I think a lot about your hands.’

Scattered up the stairs, like junk mail or children’s toys, are single gloves; striped woollen mittens; fat red leather boxing gloves; white cotton gloves; pale blue fleece gloves; arctic explorers’ thermal gloves; pink satin gloves. She feels her knees buckle then, squats on the floor, staring at them.

‘Why my hands?’ she asks dully.

‘Your hands are just so fucking beautiful,’ he whispers. ‘Every part of them. The skin, lovely and smooth, that cute little freckle between your thumb and index finger. Your knuckles, I love your knuckles. The way you chew your right thumb-nail sometimes. I love that. Your grip — small hands you’ve got, but such a strong grip -’

‘Dougie,’ she says, her voice coming from somewhere else, ‘something weird’s going on. The village is full of gloves.’

He barks with laughter. ‘Gloves? In this weather? Have you been on the gin for breakfast, darling?’

‘All over the place. And in the house,’ she says, and begins to cry. ‘Up the stairs.’ She clicks off the handset, places it carefully on the floor. In the kitchen, it’s worse; they are all over the table, on the Aga, hanging off the sides of the sink, piled up on chairs. Some are fingerless; one unraveling black wool one stinks of manure. There are three — one grey woollen, one red leather, one blue rubber — in the toilet bowl; she fishes them out, and they lie sodden on the floor, like stranded fish. They are scattered over the living room, the bath is full of them, and, peeling back her duvet, she knows what she will find.

By mid-morning, she’s filled three bin-bags with them. She dumps them in the shed. This is a joke, a stupid, malicious joke, the sort of thing some bored rural nutter would do. When Mike calls this evening, she’ll tell him; you think London was bad; at least there the dangers were obvious, if someone didn’t like you they told you to your face, or pushed you around; but this…..

She slaps on suntan lotion, sits on the patio bench and smokes another cigarette. She’ll call Dougie back, tell him she’s fine. Some joker trying to freak her out. Must have got in somehow; she’s always leaving windows open, to try to air this oven of a house. The heat’s almost unbearable now, the garden shimmers with it; bees bristle the lavender to a frenzy. And her sunglasses seem to have disappeared. Bloody ironic, really; nothing to shield her eyes, and truck-loads of single gloves she doesn’t want.

She draws the smoke deeply into her lungs, and relaxes. Five minutes, and she’ll call him. He’ll be bemused, he’ll think she’s a bit flaky, but he’ll forgive her. He’ll forgive her anything. She is his muse, he told her once, his muse, his slut, his whore, his heart.

When she presses the button on the handset, the line is dead.

Outside in the normally quiet road, the neighbours are gathering, all holding sagging armfuls of gloves. They spill out of their hands, fall onto the ground. Some gloves she recognizes as being the partners for those she’s encountered earlier; the middle-aged woman from the immaculate semi over the road, who bought her a tin full of chocolate brownies ‘for the children’ the day she moved in, and spent half an hour trying to persuade her to join the W.I., is brandishing the matching turquoise silk glove with the dragonflies.

‘My house is full of them!’ Mary splutters, puce-faced. Tessa sweats in the heat, dizzy, dry-mouthed. The graphic designer from three doors down reports that he can’t get a signal for his mobile phone.

‘I’m going for help,’ barks Mary, unlocking her car, ’clearly we’re under siege. You, young man, you can come with me.’

‘I’ve got a deadline,’ the graphic designer protests, before climbing into the passenger seat.

Tessa watches them drive away on a road blurred with heat, as all around her shrill women compare horror stories of opening fridges and freezers to find evening gloves frosted and stiff by packets of watercress and bags of prawns, and an avalanche of them tumbling out of dishwashers. They sound like parrots, shrieking. She feels strangely detached; it’s nearing midday and the sun will soon be at its height. She sits on the pavement and picks up a child’s grey woollen mitten, the sort her older brother would fill full of snow and stuff down her neck. She thinks of Dougie’s voice saying ‘Your grip — small hands you’ve got, but such a strong grip -‘

Someone is shaking her shoulder. ‘The school,’ a woman’s voice is saying, and Tessa turns to look at her tight red face, ‘shouldn’t we go to the school? I mean, if they’re all over the place here, the children, and we can’t phone, you’ve got two girls, haven’t you -’

‘My girls,’ says Tessa slowly, ‘oh God, my girls,’ and she stands on legs that hardly support her, remembering Louise’s voice; Don’t take us in, Mum. Stay there.

She almost twists her ankle by the war memorial, she’s running so fast, and the gloves are pattering down softly from above, brushing against the names of the fallen. The villagers stand around in clots, watching the sky. News teams have arrived in fleets of cars and vans and sweating men with shirt-sleeves rolled up swoop on bemused shop-keepers and pensioners for comments. The tea-shop owner has put out a sign advertising iced tea and chilled drinks. Glossy-lipped young women check their hair before speaking earnestly into microphones.

Police cars are parked along the road outside the school; she‘s dazzled by the bright yellow stripes on the white paint. The school gates and front doors are locked. Parents clamour to be let in. The head-teacher, still in his dark suit and tie, rivulets of sweat coursing down his face, stands at the gates and barks through a megaphone.

‘We are evacuating the building, please be patient, the police have asked us — ‘

The playground is full of children breaking free from their lines and chasing gloves floating down, catching on slides and climbing frames and benches. Teachers try to pull them back into line, but they are beyond telling. She sees Amy, socks around her ankles, waving a red lace fingerless glove through the air like a tiny kite.

There is no sign of Louise.

‘Amy,’ Tessa calls through the gates, as a fresh shoal of white cotton gloves patter onto the tarmac, ‘Amy, where’s Louise? Where’s your sister?’

Dougie’s voice crashes into her thoughts. ‘Your hands are just so fucking beautiful…..‘ Her hands had gripped his cock the last time they’d been together, had smoothed his chest, his thighs, his arse. He’d praised the smoothness of her skin, the way her hands hadn’t become rough and tired.

 ’Where’s Louise? Where is she?’ shouts Tessa, but Amy laughs.

‘We don’t always have to be together, do we? Look at me, Mum.’ Amy stands on her own in the heat of the midday sun and lifts her face and arms to the softly pattering leather, rubber, cotton, wool and satin — all the gloves in the world falling like exquisite snowflakes from the blinding blue sky.