Vicki Feaver

After Pierre Bonnard

The woman’s cupboard, she’s stocked with jellies, chutneys, pickled limes

and bottles of blue-skinned plums that just to look at is to taste

their sweet green flesh. Inset in the wall, the inside’s painted the red of petals –

poppies, geraniums – of dream blood. When she opens the white door

it’s like opening herself. Among jars of...

Every year you said it wasn’t worth the trouble – you’d better things to do with your time – and it made you furious when the jars were sold at the church fête for less than the cost of the sugar.

And every year you drove into the lanes around Calverton to search for the wild trees whose apples looked as red and as sweet as cherries, and tasted...

Ever since, in an act of reckless middle age, I broke my wrist learning to skate, my right hand

refuses to sleep with me. It performs the day’s tasks stiffly, stoically; but at night

slides out from the duvet to hollow a nest in the pillow like an animal gone to ground

in a hole in the hedge whose instinct says have nothing to do with heart, lungs, legs,

the dangerous head. I dreamed of...

cut right through the house: a black wiggly line you could poke a finger into, a deep gash seeping fine black dust.

It didn’t appear overnight. For a long time it was such a fine line we went up and down stairs oblivious to the stresses

that were splitting our walls and ceilings apart. And even when it thickened and darkened, we went on not seeing, or seeing

but believing the crack...

First there are the jokes about how it’s going on the ‘South Col’, or the ‘Big C’; but half serious,

as if you really had returned from inching your way up a vertical rockface, or sailing single-handed across his painted ocean.

Then I ask about them – those friends of yours I never meet, but you are now so intimate with you know the day-to-day state

of...