She looks at the springy coils of her hair, bobbing ringlets, brown mostly but with the odd blonde one poking out like a rogue pasta twirl – spit – unruly and energetic, as if she is some child in a playground, and discordant now – spit – that she is on the cusp of her forties. She can feel herself gliding into that invisible – gargle – phase of womanhood, alongside those pushing prams or pulling shopping wheelies. She is drawn to the wider fittings in Clarks, has begun to have knee trouble and is disturbed to find that clipping her toenails leaves her vaguely out of puff. She wonders what other indignities ageing will throw at her and how soon. A few centuries ago she’d be dead, having had eight children by the age of twenty-five. Nature doesn’t know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curve ball – aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.
She wipes a blob of foam off her chin with a towel. Eventually, he asked about her name (her moment in the sun!) and she told him it meant ‘bitter’ in Hebrew, and she lay back on the pillow, remembering how her mother had squeezed her secondary-school shoulders and told her how much she’d loved it; how ‘Manon’ was her folly, much as her father objected. A Marmite name, you either loved it or loathed it, and her mother loved it, she said, because it was ‘all held down’, those Ns like tent pegs in the ground.
There was silence, in which she supposed he wanted her to ask about his name, which she couldn’t really, because she wasn’t sure what it was. She could have said, ‘What about yours?’ as a means of finding out, but by that point it seemed unnecessary. She had smelt him out and found him wanting. Her mind was set on how to get him out of her flat, which she did by saying, ‘Right then, early start tomorrow,’ and holding open her bedroom door.
She smoothes out the pillow and duvet where he’s been and pushes her feet down under the covers, reaching out an arm from the bed to switch on the radio, with its sticker reminding her it remains ‘Property of Cambridgeshire Police’. A cumbersome bit of kit, and no one at detective sergeant rank is supposed to have one at home, but it is not a plaything. It is the method by which she overcomes insomnia. Some rely on the shipping forecast; Manon prefers low murmurings about road traffic accidents or drunken altercations outside Level 2 Nightclub on All Saints Passage, all of which she can safely ignore because they are far too lowly for the Major Incident Team.
‘VB, VB, mobile unit to Northern Bypass, please; that’s the A141, junction with Main Street. UDAA.’
Unlawfully Driving Away an Automobile. Someone’s nicked some wheels. Off you pop, Plod. The voice begins to sound very far away as Manon’s eyelids grow heavy, the burbling of the radio merging into a pebbly blur behind her eyes. The clicks, switches, whirring, receivers picked up and put down, colleagues conferred with, buttons pressed to receive. To Manon, it is the sound of vigilance, this rapid response to hurt and misdeed. It is human kindness in action, protecting the good against the bad. She sleeps.
Sunday
Miriam
Miriam is washing up, looking out over the bleak winter garden – the lawn smooth as Christmas icing. She’d have liked a bigger garden, but this is about as good as it gets in Hampstead.
She’s thinking about Edith, her hands inside rubber gloves in the sink, washing up the Le Creuset after lunch’s monkfish stew. The pancetta has stuck around the edges and she is going at it with a scourer. She’s so lucky, she thinks, to have a girl, because girls look after you when you get old. Boys just leave home, eventually going to live cheek by jowl with their mothers-in-law.
And then she curses herself, because it goes against all her feminist principles – requiring her daughter, her clever, Cambridge-educated daughter, to wipe her wrinkly old bottom and bring her meals and audio books, probably while juggling toddlers and some pathetic attempt at a career. Her own career hadn’t recovered from having the children, those three days a week at the GP surgery feeling like time-filling in between bouts of household management.