by Sarah Bower

Amy’s school blouses, brushed cotton with frilled, Peter Pan collars, wouldn’t need ironing if I had used the tumble drier instead of pegging them out on the line the way my mother taught me, but what our mothers teach us runs deep. The iron slides easily over the boxy body shapes, no darts, no womanly nips and tucks, though I take time over the collars, navigating the bow of the iron in and out of tiny fjords of lace.

You could reconstruct the entire life of this household from the contents of the ironing basket, from shapes and sizes, textures and folds, and the smell of the air trapped between each layer of fabric. Each level has its story to tell.

After Amy’s shirts, a pale blue romper suit, legs ballooned and ruched like small, blue pumpkin shells. The iron flattens, my fingers pinch and pleat, fold and smooth. I lay the suit on top of the two white blouses, inhaling the sweetness of hot baby powder, and move on to the next layer, the Egyptian cotton business shirts with cut away collars and fine checks in muted shades. Five. One for every day of the week. I notice one still bears a tiny black ink stain, but it’s inside the breast pocket so it won’t show. The iron glides over the collars, pressing dead skin cells in among cotton fibres, releasing a faint odour of cigarette smoke, sweat, the aftershave I put in Clive’s Christmas stocking.

No unfamiliar perfume, no lipstick traces. I have never found someone else’s earring in his jacket pocket or a credit card bill for a restaurant he pretends not to like. It’s not that I’m luckier than she was, luck plays no part in it. I work hard at being Clive’s wife, just as he puts in long hours at the office to pay the school fees, the subscriptions to the leisure club, the golf club, the National Trust. To finance Caribbean holidays and weekends in Prague or Barcelona. We’re a team.

Now I come to the bed sheets, sprinkling them with lavender water, the iron skating across the expanse of glazed white, erasing memory and filling the empty space with promise. Tonight, after the children are sound asleep, after the seductive warmth of the River Café shinco arrosto now steaming in the slow oven of the Aga, its thyme perfume mingling with talc and lavender in perfect domestic harmony, and a bottle of that nice shiraz Clive bought from the Sunday Times Wine Club, I shall pose on these sheets in my French lace nightgown. Keeping my back straight to ensure my breasts look pert, I shall draw up my knees to conceal the damage done to my stomach muscles by child bearing, which even my regular visits to the gym and the toning tables have yet to undo to my satisfaction. And I shall smile at my husband, up under my blond fringe and tinted lashes, my smile projecting its suggestions onto the blank screen of white cotton.

I always do my pelvic floor exercises while I’m ironing. I am determined to hold on to my man.

As I reposition the iron to tackle the corners of the fitted bottom sheet, moulding each one around the tip of the board, a series of dings and rattles from upstairs alerts me to the fact that George has woken from his nap and is playing with his activity centre. He will start to cry soon. Balancing the iron on its stand and switching off the mains, I hurry upstairs to fetch him. He has such a persistent cry, a high pitched seagull wail, which never seems to require him to draw breath. It’s not his fault. But I must get there before he starts.

I glance at the clock on his wall; surely he’s woken early. But no; with the familiar clenching in my stomach, the sense of time slipping away, out of control, I realise it’s only an hour until I have to pick up Amy from school. And George’s nappy has leaked, yellow brown stains around one leg of his rompers, spreading on to the sheet, through to the mattress probably…And oh God, there’s the doorbell. Keep calm, take deep breaths, on second thoughts don’t, not until George is cleaned up and the cot bedding sealed into the washing machine.

The doorbell shrills again. I put George back in his cot; I can’t answer the door with him covered in shit. He starts to scream. I can’t let whoever is on the doorstep hear that noise. I pick him up, wrapping him in his quilt, bunching it between us to shield my clothes from the contents of his nappy leaking down his leg. His fury subsides into a series of grunts and whimpers as he struggles to be free of my arms and the swaddling quilt. By the time I reach the door, he has slipped so his legs are dangling free and I am gripping him awkwardly around his chest. He has one fist entangled in my hair, so I have to hold my head slightly sideways to prevent him pulling a clump of it out at the roots.

"God, I’m sorry, not a good time obviously."

Her. She’s probably been waiting, lurking behind the hedge at the back, spying, choosing her moment. She’s like that, Clive says, devious, calculating, plans things. The way she planned to leave him, choosing her moment for that too.

"I’d have let myself in," she says coolly, "though of course I don’t have a key any more."

George flings himself backwards, flexing his body like a leaping fish. I wince as he yanks my hair and his feet poke my belly. "You’d better come in. You can wait in the kitchen while I change him." As though she’s delivering the meat or the milk. A fierce pleasure slices through me.

She laughs, faded brown eyes crinkling at the corners. "Charlie was just like that," she says, "squirmed like an eel if you ever tried to cuddle him. Must be a Clive trait."

I try to disentangle my hair, but only succeed in catching my eternity ring in it as well as George’s fingers.

"Here, let me." She steps forward; instinctively I step back, allowing her across the threshold. I try to raise my head, out of her reach, but I’m stuck fast and have to submit. Her nails are filthy. "I cut all my hair off when our kids were small. Into spikes. Dyed the tips purple."

I bet she did. Probably wore dungarees and Doc Martens too. No wonder Clive… "Ouch!"

"Sorry. There, that’s better." Glossy golden strands lying in her palm, supported by a trellis of black lines, lifeline, heartline, headline, all ingrained with soil.

"Thank you," I say, because I will not let her catch me out in anything as simple as bad manners. "I’m afraid there’s ironing everywhere," I add, as I climb the stairs with George and she walks down the passage to the kitchen, and a vision of that palm gliding over my ironed sheets lurches into my throat like nausea. If she makes a reply, I do not hear it, because George, thinking he is going to be put back to bed, starts to cry again, making my scalp throb where the hair was pulled out.

Changing him, cleaning, powdering, dropping soiled things into scented plastic bags, lifting clean clothes from neat drawers and smoothing them over his soft limbs, helps me compose myself. Before going back downstairs, I give myself the once over in George’s dressing table mirror, running his baby brush through my hair, dusting talc from the breast of my blouse. I might even offer her coffee, I think, remembering the first time I drank coffee in this kitchen, when she had gone to the house in France with the boys, and Clive brought me back here after a late meeting.

He couldn’t find any clean cups so I rinsed a couple of mugs under the tap while his hands snaked around my waist, then lower, pulling me back against him so there was no mistaking his intentions. Put the kettle on, I’d told him firmly, batting his lips away from my ear. The room had potential, with its high ceiling and French windows; it merited more than a quick fuck up against the fridge door, dislodging a shower of Simpsons magnets.

I have a Smeg fridge now, pastel green, no magnets in case they damage the enamel.

She is sitting at the kitchen table, one forearm resting on the antiqued pitch pine surface, one sleeve of her patched and frayed waxed jacket almost brushing Amy’s school blouses, the cold, oily smell of the wax insinuating itself in among the scents of lavender and thyme and spring bouquet fabric conditioner. The iron clicks and wheezes as it cools on its stand. I put George in his playpen in the window bay.

"Coffee?" I hold up the Alessi bird kettle.

She shakes her head. "That’s kind, but no thanks, you’re obviously busy and I have a lunch date. I only came about the mahonia by the back door. Clive said I could take it. He said you were afraid of the children catching themselves on the spikes. Of course it’s pretty big now, isn’t it? When Charlie and Sam were little it was only about a foot tall."

"Where are you going to put it?" I think of her terraced house on the other side of town. I’ve never seen it, of course, but I can imagine it, looking out on to a dark concrete yard with a brick shed that used to be an outside toilet, and beyond it a patchwork of more yards, broken bicycles, dingy washing on sagging carousels, chipped pots of blackened geranium stalks.

"Oh it’s not for me, there was a gorgeous one already in my garden when I bought the cottage. A japonica. Lovely perfume, all through the winter. It’s for a client." She started up this gardening business, after she and Clive were divorced.

"Won’t they mind a second hand plant?"

"It’s no different to moving house and taking over someone else’s garden, is it?" She glances around the kitchen. "Ironing," she says, after a pause, "never done when they’re little. Thank God Sam and Charlie are old enough to do their own. I’ve got pots of next year’s bedding plants germinating on my ironing board at the moment."

George, deprived of attention, begins to grizzle. I see he is trying to fit a triangular peg into the square hole of his shape sorting hippopotamus and go to help him.

"I’ve brought my own tools," she says, "and a barrow. So I’ll just dig it up and be on my way."

I catch myself wanting to tell her the way to the back door as she rises from the table, the back door where her sons still leave their trainers when they visit. I wanted to rebuild this kitchen, not merely redecorate it, to erase the layer of its history which contained the bones of Clive’s first marriage. Not everything can be preserved, there are hard decisions to be made about what is worth the effort.

Once George is settled, I return to my ironing. I must finish it before going to pick up Amy, otherwise it will still be piled up on the kitchen table when Clive comes home. I can hear her outside, the crunch of her spade in the earth, her footsteps going back and forth along the path around the house, the rumble of her barrow. I turn on the radio, slam the iron down harder on shirts and sheets, socks and babygrows, but the sound of her remains, a muffled bass reverberating around the empty spaces of the house’s foundations.

I pick a tea towel out of the bottom of the basket, faded, curled at the edges like old paper. A heading says, "A Present from Jorvik", in a round, curlicued script, and underneath, a series of cartoons of everyday life among the Vikings. This is almost as much a relic as the Vikings themselves, a souvenir of my days as an archaeology student in York. I have tea towels to match the kitchen china now, I thought I’d thrown all the old ones away. I suppose Clive must have been using it in the garage or the garden shed; beneath the scent of fabric conditioner there are smells of motor oil and wet grass, and something else.

Sour milk, the insides of mugs washed in cold water, stale cigarette butts, mud, paraffin and insect repellent. Smells of excitement, of great discoveries just below the surface, the intimacy of damp tents on summer nights and dreams of fame.

"I’m off now," she shouts through the back door and I watch her through the front window, the mahonia nodding farewell as she barrows it down the drive to her van. She is whistling, Clive’s former wife, with her grimy nails, her grey-veined hair and cracked-heeled Wellingtons, as though she hasn’t a care in the world.

I smooth the tea towel over the ironing board with my fingertips, carefully clearing stones and soil from an old, old artefact, the image of a girl in torn jeans and a sweater that used to belong to her father, on her knees in a waterlogged trench, picking a decorated potsherd out of the slime, pinching it triumphantly between dirt-ingrained fingers. But the image is frail and unstable, fading and crumbling with the sudden exposure to air.

Glancing at the clock, I realise I must go for Amy. As I pass the kitchen bin on my way across the room to pick up George, I screw up the tea towel and toss it in.

I lock the door carefully behind me as I leave.