Free The Ice is Singing by Jane Rogers

order, the nagging sense that his smiles and applause may be feigned, that he may have preferred to have his tea first, that he’d
rather have taken my word for it. My disappointment when she couldn’t walk for him, didn’t talk to him; my swallowed anger that both of them weren’t behaving exactly as I wished
them to.
    And yet I was so happy, so proud, so loving. It lingers like a smell.
    * * *
    At night in their bedroom. I would go up during the evening to check on them sleeping, Ruth in her bed, Vi in her cot. Not just one but two of them, incomparably precious,
sprawled carelessly under and over covers, limbs flung in abandonment, faces clean and sweet. When he was out in the evening (he never knew this, no one did) I sat by their beds and watched them
sleep. Regularly – sometimes for an hour or so. I see their faces now in the dim light; the way Ruth often slept with her eyes not quite shut, her relaxed face as simple and sweet as a baby
animal. She would move suddenly, as if impatient of my watching, and then become completely relaxed again, and roll back to her previous dent in the pillow. Vi slept on her belly, back hunched, bum
in the air – face squashed sideways on the mattress. Sometimes watching through the bars of the cot I felt it was only my concentration that held her there, in life. I wondered why I should
be so blest as to have her stay.
    * * *
    The first time I took Ruth swimming, she was eight months old. Everyone I passed smiled at her or said hello. I lowered her into the pool and she beamed at me – then I
held her hands and pulled her through the water, and she began to scream with delight. Literally, she screamed, fierce loud screams of absolute excitement and delight. Her pleasure made me laugh so
much I nearly fell over myself, and had to sit on the side with her till we both felt cold enough to be less hysterical.
    * * *
    Ruth at thirteen, going on a school trip to Stratford, couldn’t decide what to wear. I was chopping onions, didn’t look up as soon as she came into the kitchen
– and when I did look, my eyes were watering. She stood aggressively in the doorway, looking suddenly older and also like someone else. I couldn’t think who, till I realized she was
wearing my favourite jumper, a black angora with a deep V-neck. She wore it with nothing underneath.
    I told her she looked like a tart. I made her take it off.
    She looked beautiful. It was my jumper. I didn’t tell her she could try it on.
    Now I don’t wear it any more.
    * * *
    Gareth. Coming home and looking at me. Pressing me. And in answer I held up a child, talked of children, insisted that he share the revelling in children – myself hidden
behind the wall of their achievements and demands, myself more secure than a nun in her cell, rung and hung about with children.
    * * *
    Gareth. As time passed, becoming the cipher that I lived with. The cipher of my creation, the cipher for whom I lived. In that bright innocent world when we were young and the
children were young, that was the first worm, wasn’t it, to insinuate itself to the heart of the rose?
    It is hard to repossess the beautiful, absolute young Marion, in all her clarity of blinkered innocence. Not I, but she.
    One spring evening, for instance. Gareth is working late (she has no idea. Where ignorance is bliss why should she want to be wise? She does not want to know him. She would not like him if she
did) and she has put the children to bed. He is due home at nine. She tidies up, then prepares a meal, sets the table. She slips into the garden and gathers some flowers, arranges them on table and
mantelpiece. Then she takes a bath and puts on pretty clothes, something she could not wear while the children were about. Preparing for Gareth’s return.
    Innocent Marion. Everything she does is for Gareth. She does not take pleasure in cooking, nor in eating the delicious food she has prepared; nor in the tranquil beauty of the home she has
created.