The First Cut

Her father cleared his throat. “I suppose you’d like to drop by the flat first and pick up a few things,” he suggested.

Kirsten didn’t, in particular, want to set foot in her tiny bedsit again, but neither did she want her parents to think she had lost all interest in life. Even if some of her deepest feelings were numb and her instincts were beyond her control, she could still make an effort to behave in the normal, accepted ma

The car slid smoothly away from the gloomy Victorian hospital and toward the student area of town: rows of tall, old houses in which entire families and servants once used to live. Blackened by two hundred years of industry, and emptied by a succession of changes-the breakup of the family unit, the Great War, the Depression, the inability of most people to afford servants-they had fallen into the hands of local businessmen, who transformed the once magnificent rooms, with their high ceilings and fixtures where the chandeliers used to hang, into small flats or bedsits-as many to a building as they could manage-and rented them to students.

Kirsten had an attic room in a cul-de-sac near the park. After spending her first year feeling miserable in a bright, noisy student residence, she had been happy there for the last two years. As the three of them got out of the sleek, silver-gray car, she noticed people along the street looking out through their curtains. It must be quite a spectacle, she supposed, finding a Mercedes parked in such a place, where the cobbles still stuck through the various attempts at tarmac.

Torn newspapers, chip wrappers, empty cigarette packets and cellophane paper littered the pavement and gutters; weeds and unmown grass consumed the garden. In the hallway, which looked as if it hadn’t been swept for a month, neat piles of mail lay on a rickety old table.

The time-switch Kirsten pressed revealed a bare bulb on each landing and cobwebs in the high cornices. The walls were painted a color somewhere between eggshell blue and institutional green-painted, that is to say, some years ago-and the high ceilings were puce-what Sarah called “puke.” In the light of the unshaded sixty-watt bulbs, the place looked even worse than it was.

As they climbed the stairs, Kirsten was aware of her mother’s stiff disapproval. On entry, she seemed to have held her breath and not let it out for fear of having to breathe in again.

Feeling foolish as she did so, Kirsten knocked on her own door. She still had a key, but the room was officially Sarah’s now and she couldn’t just barge in. She hoped Sarah didn’t have a naked man in her bed.

The door opened. Kirsten noted with relief the empty room behind Sarah, who wasn’t even wearing one of her calculatedly offensive T-shirts that day. Instead, she wore white trousers and a baggy blue sweatshirt with UCLA printed across the front.

“Kirstie, love!” she yelled. Her fine, porcelain features broke into a smile anyone would have expected to shatter them, and she flung her arms around Kirsten.

Kirsten returned the embrace, then broke away gently. She didn’t react as badly as she had to Galen’s touch, but she still felt herself drawing back inside, holding in.

“My mother and father.” She stood back and introduced her parents, who hovered in the doorway.

“Cup of tea?” Sarah asked.

“That’d be lovely.” Kirsten looked at her father, who nodded. Her mother shook her head slightly and looked at her watch. “Not for me, thank you, dear. We really must set off soon if we’re to be home this evening.” She directed the comment at her husband.

“Oh, we’ve time for a cup of tea,” he said, smiling at Sarah and sitting down in the scuffed red armchair with winged arms. It was Kirsten’s favorite, the spot where she had sat to do her reading and make notes for essays.

The L-shaped room was just about large enough to hold four people: all it contained was the two matching armchairs in front of the gas fire, a three-quarter mattress on the floor beneath the window, a small clothes cupboard set in the wall, and a desk and bookshelves by the other wall. A portable stereo cassette player stood on one of the shelves beside a rack of tapes. Sarah was playing Bruce Springsteen singing “ Nebraska.” She turned down the volume before she went to put the kettle on in the kitchenette, which was tucked away in the short end of the L and separated from the rest of the room by a thin red curtain.

Kirsten sat on the mattress, which had always had to double as a sofa when she had guests. She gazed over at the poster on the wall above the pillows-a print of Van Gogh’s Sun-flowers-and remembered the first time she and Galen had made love on that very mattress the night after the English Department Christmas dance at the start of their second year. As she thought about it, and about all the other wonderful times they had slept there together, her loins ached with longing and loss. She could still see him standing by the roadside waving. Of course, she would never see him again. It was for his own good.

Her mother made a point of standing by the window with her arms tightly folded. Whether it was the sight of the park-the scene of the crime-at the end of the street that intrigued her, or whether she was just keeping an eye on the Merc, Kirsten didn’t know. She could sense her mother’s disapproval of the bedsit. Nose in the air, she seemed only a hairbreadth away from ru

Her parents had never visited the room-or even the city-before. The rough-and-ready atmosphere and basic living conditions must have been just as much of a shock to their tender southern sensibilities as they had been to hers at first. Over two years, though, she had had a chance to get used to it. At her age, too, she was more concerned about parties, books, films, plays and love than she was about living in a spotless mansion. Unlike her mother, Kirsten had never been particularly house-proud. Even her room at home had always been a mess. Surfaces hadn’t mattered too much as long as she had been having fun. She washed the dishes regularly, dusted and went to the launderette once a week: that was it. Besides, these houses were so old and decrepit you couldn’t do much with them even if you tried. They were only temporary: places to pass through, not to make nests in.

Sarah came back with the cracked teapot and three mugs. Kirsten’s father accepted his sugarless tea graciously, and her mother continued to stand like a statue by the window. Her father made small talk with Sarah while Kirsten made a pretense of searching the room for the things she was supposed to want. She picked up the small pile of mail-mostly junk-from the desk and shoved a few clothes and a random selection of books into the old suitcase in the cupboard. Then she sat down to finish her tea, which had cooled by then.

“Is that all you want?” Sarah asked.

“For the moment. I’ve got plenty of stuff back home-clothes and that.”

“But the books…?”

“Hang on to them for me, will you? I think I need a rest from literature.”

Sarah eyed the shelves, still more than three-quarters full. “I suppose it’s about time I read Shelley and Coleridge,” she said, smiling. “Though I’d pla

Kirsten shrugged and took one book down for her. “That’s a good one. The prof who wrote it is supposed to be able to tell what village you come from just by your accent. They say he’s usually accurate within ten miles or so. I never got as good as that, but…”