BELINDA RULE

The family silver, 1999

I. In the dark square wooden room at noon,
the table was laid, the silver unwrapped and
spaced around the black waxed table,
click, click, and her block heels
moving two steps further, clack, clack.

I always imagine their house as dark the way
the leather blotter beneath great-grandfather’s elbow
in the portrait is dark, the way the backdrop
is as black as pooled treacle round his
combed silver head. I imagine
dark dado walls in every room,
cedar-stained floorboards
long and straight
in the hall, hooded beds
seamless with the floor,
drapes like armloads of dropped kelp. It is true I could

be wrong, I have never been to their house, and
anyone who could tell me of it
with adult eyes is
as dead now as they are: so quickly
they go and sometimes
I fear my own house will blink out beneath me
like a pulled rug, another place that has
quietly packed its bags in the night and
left for the other side, not even a note
in the place the fridge used to be.

II.
The house where great-grandfather, painted,
now lurks in the downstairs hall
is the house of the wife of his son,
man I hardly remember but
as the first death of my childhood, and a man
who would not have children putting
sunscreen on in carpeted rooms. It is her
house where his
rice-paper irises glowed in the dark at me
through the open door of the guest room
as a child, and I wondered about Deans
of the Church of England the way
I might have wondered about zebras and
unemployed people. It is her house we are debating
how to kill now, the way
that electric shock in her twenties
from the bright new Bakelite kettle
finally killed her, that tiny maimed ventricle
a moth in a cage
nursed fifty years.

If I believed in a heaven
it would be one
where the jewellery we split between us
stays in the one box. God
save me from the day that portrait is mine.
And the rest: the photo of a lady
with one shoulder bare, I remember
a great scandal, but not her name; among my jewellery
a single porcelain flower earring,
rhinestones fallen out, a carved wooden egg;
now a black-and-white street
strung with swastikas,
a woman with long plaits
in a motorcycle sidecar,
twenty-five sheets of iron-on embroidery transfers—Mexicans on donkeys,
stop, already. I may never tell another story again.
I can barely find my own life
beneath these hair-ties and Safeway receipts.

Home again, I dodge calls, read nothing, find
in a cupboard
a certain child-sized towel, embroidered
with a robin on a winter twig,
and smell it. Then one night, framed in the flywire, I see
my mother, stooping, dirty-kneed,
potting everlastings
in a salvaged clay pipe. I see

this is she,
the last one, the last line of cavalry
on an empty hill
between me and the day
the dead die again when I’m asked,
“Who’s that in the picture?”