How It Was

by Janet Ellis

  When we went into Eddie’s ward I couldn’t distinguish him from the other patients. In my panic, the identical beds and bedding and the uniformity of illness made them all look the same. I waited for Michael to lead the way, afraid I might go to the wrong boy. Several nurses hovered nearby. I hung back. Eddie’s eyes were glassy and deeply set. The splints on his arms kept them rigidly at his sides. I stroked one hand. He was trying to open his eyes but it seemed to be too difficult for him to move anything at all.

  I wanted to sit on the bed but it felt out of bounds. I perched instead on the only chair. ‘Does it hurt very much?’ I said. His white face was splodged at uneven intervals, like an artist’s palette. There was a livid, mauve half-moon beneath one eye and a darker, purple circle around the other. He still had dots of brown blood on his cheeks.

  He said something I couldn’t hear and I put my ear to his mouth, tucking my hair out of the way. ‘Not too much,’ he said again and him being quieter than he’d ever been before made me want to cry.

  ‘You have been in the wars, haven’t you,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want to frighten him with my fear. I stayed where I was for a moment, hearing his breath and inhaling the new, terrible, hospital smell of him. No wonder animals reject their young if the scent of them is wrong. I looked up at Michael. He was watching me.

  ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea,’ he said. I kissed the air above Eddie’s forehead, afraid of his swollen skin.

  The cafeteria was empty. A League of Friends banner drooped on one wall. I sat down at a table still damp with disinfectant. ‘You’re too early,’ the woman behind the counter said to Michael, ‘we’re not meant to be open yet.’ She glanced over at me. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Have you come from the children’s ward? All right, then. But you’ll have to wait for the urn.’

  ‘I think this is tea,’ Michael said, putting a green cup and saucer, the colour of milk glass, in front of me. ‘It behaves like tea does and it’s roughly the same colour.’ We sat in silence.

  I braced myself. I knew what he was going to say and I prepared my defence. Not a defence, exactly, but an explanation: Yes, I’d say, I’ve been an idiot, it didn’t mean anything, I was just feeling lonely. Well, not lonely, but not right in myself. Lost, really. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Adrian, I was going to tell Michael, was vain and silly.

  I waited. Michael said nothing.

  A nurse – she looked scarcely older than Sarah – ran up to the counter. Curly hair escaped from underneath her cap. I reached instinctively to my own head, as if Matron were going to admonish us both for being untidy. ‘Jean! You open?’ the girl said. ‘I’m gasping.’

  ‘Not really,’ the woman said.

  The nurse looked over to where we sat and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, go on, then,’ the woman said and busied herself with cups and plates.

  The girl took her cup and went and sat down at the furthest table, turning her back to us and opening a magazine. I felt unaccountably bereft, as if a lifebelt had floated past me just out of reach as I drowned.

  Michael half raised his cup to his mouth then replaced it without drinking. I studied the metal tin in front of me, stuffed with serviettes. I felt as if my body were filled with wet cement. I wasn’t in shock, I was in shame.

  ‘Sarah hates me,’ I said. ‘She blames me, too. She’s right. She tried to stop me going, but I didn’t hear her.’ I looked at Michael. His face seemed as familiar and as far away as the full moon. ‘What are we going to do?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Michael looked down at his hands. ‘Do you want to leave me?’ he said.

  ‘Leave you?’ I said, too loudly.

  The young nurse didn’t turn round but her cap quivered.

  ‘I’m not going to ask you to stay, if you don’t want to,’ Michael said. He looked as if he might disintegrate with sadness, as if it were taking a huge effort of will to keep himself together, atom by atom.

  ‘Why on earth would you still want to be with me now?’ I said. ‘I’ve behaved horribly. I was so selfish. I can never make things right after this, can I? I can’t undo what I’ve done.’ Misery threaded itself through me, vein by vein, like a vine.

  Michael pulled the sugar bowl on the table towards him and filled and emptied the spoon. The grains were damp. Little grey lumps tumbled and clumped together as he spilled them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t undo anything that’s happened. But we can come to an acceptance, an accommodation, after a while. We’ll have to, Marion. It’s what people do. I’ll stay with you. But I don’t think I can forgive you. That will have to be enough.’

  The nurse carried her cup to the counter. ‘Ta, Jean,’ she called out as she put it down. She left without looking back.

  I looked out of the window. Beyond the rows of irregularly grey Nissen huts, I could just make out the roofs and chimney stacks of the town, stretching away into the distance. I felt as if I were back on land after a long voyage. I could still feel the rocking and swaying of large waves, although there was no longer water beneath me. ‘It’s enough,’ I said.

  Chapter 82

  I am holding a picture of Eddie. He is looking straight into the camera. You can see he’s been persuaded to pose and he is desperate to fizz into movement again. It seemed impossible then that he could ever be still for long.

  The end had no beginning. I was holding one small, black plimsoll, the elastic loose and Eddie’s name inked inside, smudged with wear. I was feeling annoyed, looking round his bedroom for the other one and cursing his carelessness, out of habit, when the telephone rang. I felt no unease. Michael had gone to the hospital to bring Eddie home. I was preparing to care for him. There were no other calls on my time.

  I can see myself, still clutching the shoe, the receiver in my other hand. Even the way Michael drew breath before he spoke was enough to tell me what he was going to say. ‘Did he ask for me?’ I said.

  Michael didn’t answer.

  ‘Did he ask for me? Did he ask for Mummy?’

  ‘He asked for Sarah,’ said Michael.

  I leaned against the wall as the room spun. The house was offensive in its irrelevance. How would I ever go on living here now? Suddenly, I felt something as undeniable and unstoppable as the light of dawn. It was a great, swelling surge of relief. I was giddy with it. I almost laughed. I had nothing to fear now. I was unassailable. The worst had, irrefutably, happened.

  When Michael and I stood side by side in the hospital, I was glad I couldn’t see his face. I made an enormous effort to control my features as I didn’t want to make her job any harder for the young doctor. She was pleasant. She would have been popular at school, I thought. She had the sort of open face that suggested easy friendship.

  ‘There was nothing more we could have done, Mrs Deacon,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t have predicted it. It was very sudden. Haemorrhagic shock.’

  I knew what it was. It was page 56 of the textbook. It was a possible question in the exam. It was theory. It wasn’t meant to be this fact. It wasn’t meant to take Eddie. Beside me, I heard Michael sob. Beyond the necessary conversations with, first, doctors, then undertakers, we never discussed that moment again. If ever I began to talk about Eddie, Michael would silence me. He would leave the room to avoid the subject. Afterwards, I would listen while he cried, alone. We moved house twice after that and packed fewer possessions each time. Sarah slid beside us, a ghost of herself, as if she were half dissolved into her surroundings. Our conversations were minimal and prosaic, like the phrases in a guidebook. We were marooned in the present tense. Michael didn’t put any pictures of Eddie on display and he relegated his small things to boxes and cupboards. Unless I searched for them, there was no chance I might see anything that would make my heart stop. When we parted, there was no discussion. We were civil to each other, even affectionate, but we travelled onwards as if we shared no hinterland.

  It is human nature to turn towards light and warmth. You feel it, unexpect
edly, in the smile of a stranger or catch it in a snatch of a familiar song. Despite yourself, you respond. I walked past a high-walled garden on a hot day, a year or so after I had left. I could smell a barbecue, of course, it was that sort of summer, and hear low music. There was the rise and fall of conversation, sporadic laughter and sounds suggesting a game, perhaps, or a child’s sudden burst of speed. I didn’t envy them their gathering, those people beyond the wall. I felt instead a nostalgic ache for things that had never happened. Eddie coming towards me with a baby in his arms. Sarah placing an array of salad bowls on to a flowered tablecloth. ‘Whatever happened to that funny boy, Tom something, I think his name was?’ she’d say, not really waiting for an answer. Michael struggling with a reluctant cork, the bottle between his legs, making a great show of the battle, smiling at us all.

  This is how it was. Sarah was standing in the middle of her room. The cluttered shelves, the pictures of ponies and nursery scenes on the walls and the rosettes and the certificates pinned over the mirror all marked the liminal space between her charted childhood and the unmapped future. It was as if I couldn’t reach her, although she was only a few feet away from me. She rocked backwards and forwards, her arms wrapped around her body and her head lowered. She was moaning: a single, repeated sound; she was almost saying: ‘no, no, no,’ but it was closer to keening than words. Her hair swayed, keeping time. A van drew up outside, the driver shouted to someone and opened and slammed shut the doors. The sound of a world continuing so vigorously was vulgar and unwelcome. This is how it will be, I thought. Sarah will pack away the china animals and her books. I will wear clothes that Eddie will never see. We will eat and drink and sleep because we must, but everything will be: ‘before’ and ‘after’. We won’t speak about the ‘before’.

  I hadn’t been able to go into Eddie’s room at all. Michael said he’d deal with it, he’d clear everything away, but I wondered what he’d do when he found Eddie’s energy. Surely it was still vibrating there, the essence of him, like a wasp trapped under a glass.

  Sarah turned to me at last, rubbing tears from her cheeks with sleeves already sodden. ‘It isn’t your fault,’ I said.

  She stared at me through swollen lids. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s yours.’

  I wanted to move, to sit down or even just fold my arms, but any movement seemed impossible. Standing still required all my concentration.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘at first I was so impressed with them. With Bobbie. With him. They were so unlike us. They were all so hippy and fun and free.’

  I thought of Adrian and his callous, casual belittling of anything that might pin him down. I saw him leaving us without a backward glance.

  ‘Then I realised what he was like,’ she said. ‘I saw the truth before you did. How he made us feel beautiful and special and sexy, when all the time it was really just because he thought he could do whatever he wanted to anyone. It didn’t matter who or what it was.’

  ‘I should have protected you,’ I said.

  ‘You couldn’t have,’ she said. ‘You were too busy hurting yourself. I thought I could stand in between the two of you, turn his head, make him look at me instead and let you get away and see how stupid he was. But you kept running towards him. I just wanted all of this to go on. To stay exactly how it was. For ever. All of it, you, me, Daddy, Eddie—’ She stopped, choking on her tears.

  Some time passed, I don’t know how long, while we watched each other cry. ‘Sarah,’ I said, but that was all.

  ‘Do you know what he said to me?’ she said. ‘He said he wasn’t into little girls but if he was, he’d definitely have me. Give it a few years, he said. Then he said—’ She stopped, looking distraught.

  ‘He said: if it’s any consolation, honey, when I fuck your mother, I’ll be thinking about you.’

  I couldn’t hold on to my frozen heart. I turned to people I didn’t know and offered it to them. They thawed it enough for me to survive. The residents at Hillview never question my past, even my present doesn’t concern them. They aren’t much older than I am, but we choose to believe I am considerably their junior. I sing with them, I wheel their chairs and I slice too-big portions of cake on to tiny plates. They know me as practical, friendly, willing, even kind.

  I dispatched most of the contents of the carrier bag to the waste-paper bin. Only two letters survived the cull. This one is written on good paper, not too stiff, and with a nice hand. There’s a faint suggestion of lavender as I open it.

  Dear Marion,

  I completely understand your not coming the other day. Thank you for letting me know in good time. You’ll be glad to hear that Sarah was on very good form, both boys are bouncing (even Grandpa Michael looked a little weary by the end of the day!) and she and Matthew seem very happy. The boys have pronounced American accents now. I have to confess it took us rather aback to hear little Ted calling Michael ‘Pops’. And another one on the way! That’ll certainly keep them busy.

  Michael continues to have chest problems and continues to refuse to see the doctor. Jock was just as stubborn, but I don’t say that to Michael. He’d only say that my being widowed before doesn’t set any sort of pattern!

  This gives me a chance to say, again, how very fond he is of you. As you know, I regard our life together now as a blessing. When we met again after Jock’s death, Michael was very much on his own but you were – and you are – very important to him. My decision not to marry him was greatly influenced by my not wanting to replace you as his wife. That means, of course, that you remain his next of kin. I am more than content with that and I am sure it will present no difficulty in the future.

  I do have a favour to ask, though: I plan a trip to Vancouver next month. My cousin’s daughter’s wedding first and then some sightseeing in the back of beyond. Quite an adventure! Then I can travel on to be with Sarah when the baby arrives. Michael doesn’t want to come, he’s happy to wait for our next stay in the house in France. Might I put your number down as the first point of contact, if needs be? I can’t think you’ll be called on, but just in case.

  Thank you in advance, dear Marion. I really enjoyed our visit to the Academy the other day. Modigliani is so very calming, don’t you find? I thought you looked very well and very chic. Yellow suits you!

  Rosalind

  I keep the diary. I never read it. I’m wary of hearing that particular voice. I take Sarah’s last letter from my bag. It’s unsealed, the envelope flap merely tucked in on itself. To make it easier for me to open it.

  I can’t measure the distance between us or map my path to writing this. I’m not sure how, or when, I knew I should. This seems as inevitable as everything else. Let’s meet in April, on the tenth. I’ve kept a picture of you all this time, which might surprise you. It was taken one Christmas, there’s a paper crown on your head. You’re holding Eddie. He’s little, about two, and he’s wearing a knitted romper suit. I won’t pretend I have that photograph by chance. I wanted you both with me. I thought I was running away but I have been walking towards you all this time. I understand now why you have stayed so still.

  I am, always, your daughter. Ted is the same age as Eddie was. He looks so like him, but he has your eyes. I am not asking for your explanation. You don’t need my forgiveness. You are my mother. I want to hear you say my name.

  I start and smile, the way you do when someone taps you on the shoulder to return the hat you did not realise had fallen from your head. Sarah was in that photograph, too, of course. I place the letter in the drawer, beside all her others. The entreaties and pleas of years and years balance, one on the other, as fragile as a house of cards. I exhale. They do not fall. For the most part, I have tried to regard everything that happened with a kind of dispassionate curiosity, the way you read the labels in a museum. You note the details as you stand in front of some object or other, but you’ll forget them soon enough.

  There’s a stanza I keep turning over in my head: The human frame is well designed to hide the
secrets of the mind. I really don’t know where it came from. I suppose I must have learned it, parrot-fashion, many years ago. I think I’ll make myself something nice for supper. Over the years I have become, to my surprise, a rather good cook.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanking the following people on this page is the right thing to do, but I owe them much more than words. I am indebted to them all for their support and invaluable input. When I stumbled myopically in the foothills of early drafts and woolly thinking, they threw me ropes and shared their visions. There were innumerable fruitful conversations along the way and their encouragement never waned as the book took shape. Colleagues, friends and family all listened as I wrestled aloud with details and descriptions. I should add that their patience was extraordinary and no one lost their sense of humour in the face of my rambling, self-absorbed, often self-pitying petitions to their friendship, love and expertise.

  Fanny Blake, Erin Kelly and Cari Rosen read early and kindly. Their reactions and reports were generous and perceptive. Melanie Cantor and I shared experiences and a lot of good wine. My agent Gordon Wise is a terrific and clever cheerleader and Lisa Highton is the best editor anyone could wish for. Her ability to see a book through the tangle of early drafts and fruitless tangents is quite extraordinary and her gentle insistence on keeping on keeping on is fabulous.

  My huge thanks to the terrific team at Two Roads – Rosie Gailer, Emma Petfield, Kat Burdon, and Jo Myler for her wonderful cover design.