Anna had read somewhere, sometime, that London was like a fog, and on the first of the October mornings such as this one, she believed it. It was everywhere, though right now it was blanketing the garden with the promise that in fifteen minutes it would be gone, leaving behind those initial, crisp winter days, where you could step out of the house and allow all your senses, for one shiny moment, to anticipate Bonfire Night, or Christmas. Or, she wondered, was that the catalogues talking, the crowds on Oxford Street, already clamouring, bustling past one another in preparation for one day in their numerous but homogenous lives. When talking about Christmas to Paul, the discussion about presents was there, on her lips. Yet in her head, she would find herself wondering why they, their neighbours, Londoners, human beings in general, couldn’t just live there and then on a crisp day in October. When Paul went out of the house every morning, he was moving, always moving towards the next day, the next week. It didn’t seem fair to her. So she, in her own quiet way had begun to rebel. She washed the dishes this morning, looking out across the fog lifting from the garden, and worked with deliberate slowness. The water was hot, it pinched at her hands and she would sometimes lift one hand from beneath the bubbles and stare at the skin, for fear it was becoming dry, chapped. In the living room, a talk show blared from the television, far too early for mornings such as this, when one can imagine what it must have been like to live without televisions and their Argos Christmases.
The talk show host was yelling, because someone had been dishonest about their fidelity to their young girlfriend. She smiled to herself, that in the year her city had seen, there was still someone who could claim to know when a man, or men were lying about where they had been, or what they had or hadn’t done. Politicians, talk show hosts, the men of London town, they were all truth-tellers now, that had become their new art – the business of transparency.
The fog lifted at about quarter to ten and she could suddenly remember where it had come from, why the October morning had struck her so. It was Tuesday morning during one of her first weeks of primary school and the air was duplicated in its crispness. The leaves were brown, trodden under a beech tree that sat directly outside her kindergarten classroom. The second activity of the morning was the one where they had to rub impressions of bark onto paper and she was scared that she wouldn’t get it finished before the bell rang, that time was slipping away from her then, as it was now. The air hit you when she walked out of the classroom and the warmth was comforting when she went home that night, because all there was to worry about was some spelling and the only thoughts were of jelly and custard, a pudding she could never replicate for her own children.
She had tried to replicate the school though, with limited success. Emily, her youngest daughter had started at her own primary school, but this was a London primary school, with iron fences and some swings which looked as though they may fall over at any moment. After she had dropped Emily off at the kindergarten entrance, she went and sat on the swing, fully aware that five hundred children might be staring through their classroom at a grown woman on a swing dreaming of Octobers past.
Paul dropped the children off, it was part of the movement, because in six hours he would pick them up again and all would be well and the evenings would draw in and the mornings grow indistinguishable from them. And she would do the washing up again, because she was a housewife and it said so, on every form, application she filled out. It was alright thought, because when the washing was done she planned on walking to the shops, slowly, taking in the October morning. She had an iPod, but she, unlike so many thousands of other Londoners, could not be expressionless and she would put Carly Simon on and walk to the shops with a wry smile on her face, which betrayed the secret that she alone was listening to it. She wasn’t trendy but it didn’t matter to her, because that morning, and every morning, she was a housewife who had grown up and learnt how to slow down time.
