I Couldn't Love You More

by Esther Freud

  ‘Will I meet her?’ Rosaleen asked.

  Felix didn’t answer. He’d caught the wave of her hair, curling on her neck, and he was teasing it out with the small teeth of a rasp.

  We should have made this sculpture in the summer, Rosaleen thought as the days shortened and the nights chilled, and high as they stoked the fire, it only served to scald one side while the rest of her body shivered, but then by next summer there would be no bump to carve, only a baby, and the baby, after that first night, was never mentioned. What am I to do? The question assailed her at odd moments of the day or night – at work when the stuffiness of the post room caused her to feel faint; in the mornings when she wound a scarf around her breasts and tugged on her tightest vest. She’d stitched a length of webbing to the waistband of a skirt, moving the hook and eye to keep it up, and then today she’d received a letter from her mother, asking what date they might expect her home.

  Felix was working on her feet, turning each toe, smoothing the one visible nail.

  ‘Will they notice, do you think?’

  Felix paused.

  ‘When I go home at Christmas.’

  He turned to her, frowning. ‘That seems to me an exceedingly bad idea.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘If you didn’t notice . . .’

  ‘It’s not so much that I didn’t notice, but with a woman . . . It’s best not to presume.’

  Rosaleen winced at the thought he’d known another woman. Any other women. ‘You’d hardly believe it,’ she said to distract herself, ‘but my parents, really, they never notice anything about me.’

  ‘Let’s hope that is the case.’

  ‘If I don’t go, they’ll be suspicious.’

  ‘As long as you come back.’

  ‘So you can finish your sculpture?’ she flared.

  ‘Not at all. I’ll finish it before. Sit up. That’s it. Exactly right.’

  Later, when he’d taken her by taxi to Maida Vale to warm herself and lay new clothes out for the morning, he came and stood beside her as she ran hot water into the bath. ‘Rosaleen’ – he held her face between his hands – ‘I want you to know . . .’

  She swallowed. There was a look in his eyes that made her reel. ‘Know what?’

  ‘I couldn’t love you more.’

  It was lucky he had hold of her or she’d have fallen, and it was only when he’d careered away down the stairs, the heavy oak door slamming behind him, that she realised she’d still not asked her question: What am I to do?

  Aoife

  THERE WAS A MAN SELLING CHRISTMAS TREES BEHIND THE MOBY Dick. They took the farm truck with its open back, Cashel driving, the two girls squeezed in beside Aoife in the front.

  ‘Will your big girl be coming home for Christmas?’ It was Mr O’Malley, swaying out of the pub, and Aoife looked right at him as if he hadn’t taken her hand, only the week before, and pressed it to his lips. ‘Please God,’ she told him, ‘she’ll be over next week.’

  ‘Be sure and come up to us for a drink. We haven’t seen so much of you this last little while.’ He smiled round at Cashel, at her daughters, who, she was ashamed to say, looked down at their shoes. ‘I have a nice bottle of’ – he lowered his voice so that the word poteen was swallowed – ‘finest in the country.’

  ‘We’ll be sure to,’ Cash told him. He liked a drop. ‘Say hello to Mrs O’Malley.’ They all watched as he ambled towards his car, and stalling once, the gears screeching, he manoeuvred out on to the road.

  ‘She’ll be over when?’ Cash was frowning.

  ‘I’ve written to her. I told you.’

  ‘I know you’ve written to her, woman.’

  Aoife felt her daughters shrink, and she stood tall to show them how a husband could be managed. ‘I’ve told her it gets busy this time of year, that if she lets us know, we’ll be there at the boat to get her.’

  ‘Will we now?’ He turned his attention to the choosing of a tree.

  ‘A big one,’ Kitty dared, and they watched him as he ran his eyes over the green firs.

  ‘Do you know when Rosaleen’s coming home?’ Aoife turned to Angela, who had pulled up her hood and pushed her hands into the ends of her sleeves.

  ‘She hasn’t said.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Aoife wondered what else Rosaleen hadn’t said.

  ‘Nothing but trouble. Right from the start.’ Cashel never tired of saying it, and as a great bristling fir was loaded into the open back, Aoife thought of those desperate first weeks of her mothering, with Cash out in the blackening smoke, and she alone, feeding and shushing and walking up and down while Margaret ran the bar, and some oaf they’d brought in to help her pocketing the change. Aoife gave her usual sniff of disapproval, but there it was between them, the terrible peace of it, when the child went north to Elspeth Stead.

  She could hear it, even now, the silence of that first morning. She’d lain there, Cashel’s arms around her, one second, two, before the jolt of what they’d done had forced her up. She’d write. Tell them there had been an error, and seeing the delay in this she determined she’d go to Harrogate herself and bring the child back. She’d slipped on last night’s dress. She could smell it, the scent of old tobacco, feel the run of her stockings as she tugged them on. The bar was dark, the till empty. Cashel locked the money in a metal box. Kept the key . . . where did he keep the key? She’d stood looking at the compartments, wondering that she’d never thought to ask if it was her he didn’t trust, or Margaret, over from Cork, just as she’d come herself at seventeen, to see the world.

  ‘Eva?’ His voice had made her jump and he’d come towards her, his face shaggy with sleep, and held her by the shoulders. ‘I miss her too.’ She’d felt the quake in his chest.

  ‘I can’t . . .’ But her voice was swallowed by a siren, and there was the wrench of Margaret’s door and her petrified feet as she came running. They’d snaked into the cellar and sat there with the kegs of beer.

  ‘In a neat little town they called Belfast, apprentice to trade I was bound . . .’ If Margaret could get through two verses before another siren started, they were free to climb back up to the bar, but up it rose, a hum of panic, worse for the waiting, like a second scream. Aoife pressed herself against Cashel’s side and imagined the terror travelling through into her baby. No. She sat up straight. She’s better where she is. And she smiled encouragingly at Margaret, who’d come down without her slippers, and whose bare feet peeked out below the fringes of the rug.

  THE NEXT MORNING AT MASS Aoife heard her husband telling the Fitzgeralds, ‘News doesn’t stop for Christmas now, does it? They might not be able to spare her at the Express, that’s the thing.’ The little group around him nodded. How could they not be impressed? And the priest, when he came out, shook both their hands and lingered. ‘A lovely service, thank you, Father.’ Aoife felt grateful, as if it was him and not the Lord who had intervened in lightening Cashel’s mood, and they went off to the pub, where she bought crisps and lemonade and took them out to her daughters waiting in the car.

  * * *

  That was a happy time, out on the farm, just as we’d dreamed it all those years. The two girls at Loreto, and Rosaleen over in London all set up in her job. The news desk! Weren’t you after telling everyone who’d listen what a grand girl she was – the brains of the family – you’d mention it each Sunday after Mass, and if anyone was making the journey from England they’d know to bring you a copy of the Express. It wasn’t long before I wished they wouldn’t. Red in the face – I thought you’d have an attack – demanding to know who they’d be letting in next. Four hundred and ninety-two West Indians was how it started, you never tired of telling me, as if I’d not been there myself in Brixton, in 1948. They took over the houses on the High Street, whole families to a room, more in the rooms next door. Brixton was never the same after that, you’d say, lucky we got out, although those buildings were pitted and unsteady from the doodlebugs, and I didn’t dare mention how your own mothe
r came over from South Africa the year you were born. She’d thrown herself on her dead husband’s family, even though they’d not approved the match, and there she was, four little ones and nothing but the coldness of their shoulder. She whispered it to me in those first weeks of the war, the blinds fastened, our gas masks near, and maybe it was fear that loosened her because she didn’t speak of it again. Not even when they bombed us, fifty-six days out of fifty-seven. I say days but it was nights. I hardly need remind you. The days were for raking through the wreckage, clearing away bodies, lying down to sleep. There was a woman, buried to the neck, who’d not leave your dreams. She had a hat on, a turban it was, grimed with dust and you found her fingers below the surface of the rubble and you held them in your own. A photograph was taken, but they didn’t put it in the paper. Only happy pictures. Lads sticking together, and if there was a fireman, he was a hero.

  Thank you, that was the last thing she said, and she closed her eyes, and she was gone. All around there were men digging. The ground was sharp as needles, turned to splinters, beams and brick. Half a street demolished. No wonder you couldn’t sleep.

  Women joined the fire service. Fire watchers. Van drivers. That would have done for me, but someone had to run the pub and who was going to clean you up when you came in? There was no one who knew how bad you really were. Not your mother, or Mavis, not even Margaret, the way you teased her with your singing. I’d sit beside you in the cellar, and I’d lean against your arm, and we’d guess how low the Thames was by the bombers flying over. Double the amount when the water was at its lowest, and it sickened me to think there was a man, over there, noting down the tides, and I’d think of my own diary, kept in with my stockings, the danger days circled round with red, so God forgive me, for who would want a child born into such a world?

  Kate

  I BEND TO MY WORK, SKETCHING IN THE VEINS AND BLADES OF leaves, and as I do I feel the heat of Matt’s repentant kisses, the scorch as he impressed on me the true depths of his regret. He’d fallen asleep at Andy’s, woken early and gone straight to the office. ‘I’m so so sorry.’ Tonight he’s promised the rehearsal will be short. There’s one song that needs attention, and he’ll be back.

  It had been an unusually mild autumn, the year Freya was born, trees in mid-October still in leaf. The gale caught them like a sail, lifting their branches, ripping up their roots. Fifteen million. I stop my work and listen. Was that a taxi screeching on the road? I stand on a chair and attend to a high branch, and as I work I find that I am weaving back through every man I ever loved, in an attempt to find out how I ended here. I dismiss myself, aged seven, passing a gift to a boy who seemed to have no friends, flinching, even now, at the horror on his face when I slid the unwieldy home-made farm into his arms. I skip forward over the years, past a heart-shaped biscuit left, misguidedly, in Peter Dunphy’s desk, and not long after, a night spent in a sleeping bag beside sleek, popular Max Ravell, for which I was teased so mercilessly when I mentioned it at school that I never spoke to him again. I flash forward until I reach thirteen and set eyes on Freddie Agar at a half-term holiday camp on the Downs. It was his friend that the girls fancied – Paul, tall, in bright blue denim, flushed with their attention – while behind him, frowning at something no one else could see, stood Freddie. We spoke, a few hesitant words about the too-long, too-boring hike along a cliff path that secretly I had enjoyed, and then, at the beginning of the following year, there he was, at my school. My heart leapt as he filed into assembly, his blazer hanging from one shoulder, his shirt half tucked, and when he smiled a flash of recognition, I decided in that moment he was mine. I track over the months that followed. The weeks when only Thursdays mattered: Thursday at two forty-five, when his class streamed out from biology and mine waited to go in. I smile myself now to remember how I teamed up with Melinda Matthews, and we planned a Valentine’s party, cleared out her father’s workshop, hung batik bedspreads at the windows, lumped in her box record player, made a dip with sour cream. Did we dance? We must have, before the lights went out, and then, as if it was an order, everyone began kissing. Freddie and I looked at each other. There was nothing else to do, nothing to say, that was certain, and I close my eyes as I remember the clang of our teeth hitting, our noses bumping, and the warm sweet engine-oil smell of him as our mouths met. That was the end, and the beginning, of the party, lost as I was in a new language, following seams of pleasure as fine and white as that cliff path about which we’d moaned.

  I sketch the buds and scars of twigs even as I luxuriate in the three spring months of Freddie Agar, the kissing as we walked back and forth from bus stops, the hours lying on his bed while he read motorcycle magazines, the weekend of my fourteenth birthday when I watched him assemble a moped from two others that he’d taken apart. How I wished I could have been satisfied with that, but I wanted more, or I wanted him to want more, and rather than ask, I tried another tack: ‘Maybe we should break up?’ I was calling from a phone box, away from Alice’s inquisitive ears, away from my mother. There was a long pause. ‘All right.’ His voice was hollow, and although I had a tower of coins, it seemed there was nothing to add. ‘Bye then,’ I said and, stricken, I walked away along the empty road, watching my feet slapping against tarmac, my knees bending, my hands as they swung useless at my sides. I almost fell as I struggled up the hill, and when I balled my fists into my stomach the unused coins clinked in my pocket.

  I stood in the kitchen and waited for my mother to look round. What happened? she would surely ask, but she was busy snipping the stringy ends from beans, and my father was rearranging the contents of his shed, rakes and trowels, paint pots in order of their size. I walked through to my room and lay down on the floor, and I felt the knife that lay, cold steel, inside me, twisting as it turned.

  The door slams and Matt is home. ‘There’s a very small chance,’ he bursts in, ‘that it’s going to be good.’

  ‘What’s going to be good?’

  ‘The gig!’ He dances me along the hall to the kitchen, where he opens the fridge and stares thirstily in. ‘I hope you’ll be there.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re in my head,’ he croons, ‘you’re in my heart’ – it was a song he wrote when we first met – and he squints past the lettuce wilting in its plastic sheath, and finding no beer he shuts the door so fiercely it flies open and hangs there on its hinge.

  MATT’S BAND IS PLAYING IN the basement of a pub. Andy is on stage, tuning and retuning his guitar; Ian too, shivering a brush across the drums. I stare down at the floor. We’ve been warmed by a support band, one girl with a soaring, raspy voice. What if we’re left to cool? There’s the squeal of static, but Matt doesn’t appear. I close my eyes. It’s more than two years since they last played. Not since Ian started ward rounds at the hospital, not since Matt joined his brother’s firm. All around is a restless shuffling, and I dig my nails into my palms. When we first met there’d been gigs several times a month, tours around the country, festivals, supporting other bands. In the slow times Matt worked on a building site, and he’d come home caked in paint and plaster dust and we’d embrace, pressing our gritty selves against each other, squeeze into the same shower. There’s a whoop and a cheer and I open my eyes. Matt has bounded on to the stage. He takes the microphone and draws it to his mouth and he is singing, straight in without a pause. Keep going. I form the lyrics as if he is my child, but he doesn’t need me, he has stepped into himself. I see his smile, shy – I used to think it was for me, but I see now it is for anyone who wants it. His voice reaches out over the crowd. He’s good. He’s gorgeous – I’d forgotten – even with his leather jacket drenching him in sweat. Beside him Andy leaps and spins, a boy lost in his bedroom, while Ian, a small man, prematurely bald, thrashes at the drums.

  ‘ “Whatever the Distance”,’ I shout my request. He played it one morning a month after we met – You’re in my head, you’re in my heart . . . Whatever the distance, we’ll never be apart – and I imagined h
im driving past cactus-strewn motels, not knowing there were other kinds of distance, lands so cold and barren they could not be traversed. Matt plays his new songs, restless, jangled, and I dance, I have to, there’s no space to stand still, and then there is a song I haven’t heard before. ‘I’m Missing You’. I wait for him to catch my eye. ‘I’ve been missing you.’ He stares into the lights, and I think how I’ve been missing him.

  Afterwards I have to fight to get backstage. ‘Matt . . .’ I hold up my hand as if my ring is proof. ‘The lead singer, Matt Jensen . . . he’s my—’ The bouncer waves me through. Matt has his shirt off and he’s rubbing his hair with a towel. Annie, Andy’s girlfriend, is cracking open beers.

  ‘Babe!’ Matt pulls me to him. ‘I didn’t think you were here!’

  ‘I was here.’ My face is against his shoulder. ‘I am.’ We exchange a friendly, beery kiss.

  Everyone is going back to Ian’s. He doesn’t live too far away and we walk through the dark streets, the band of us, revelling in success. ‘You were fantastic,’ I tell Matt in the quiet moment when Ian searches for his keys, and I put my arms round his neck and check to see if he believes me.