I Couldn't Love You More

by Esther Freud

  I check and double-check the answerphone, open the cupboard, and ignoring the jacket crumpled at my feet, I pull out both our macs. But I can’t do it. I stand on the step, and even then I’m sure I hear it, the ringing of the phone. I call Krissie back and I tell her it’s best we stay at home.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ I manage. Even now someone may be trying to get through.

  IT ISN’T UNTIL SUNDAY THAT Freya asks after Matt.

  ‘He had to go’ – I’ve always been a useless liar – ‘away.’

  She doesn’t ask where, and I swallow the story about him visiting his mother, her other granny, Granny P, who she hardly ever sees. Instead we look through her book bag, read three pages of Biff and Chip, discover a note informing us that there are children in the class who still have head lice. ‘We’ll make popcorn,’ I tell her when she slumps, and putting her in charge of monitoring the pops, I fill a bowl with water, assemble tissues, conditioner, comb. Together we search through the videos. ‘Not Bambi,’ but she’s determined, so we settle to the combing as Bambi stands on trembly legs, learns the word for butterfly and bird, is befriended by a rabbit and a skunk, bracing ourselves for what is to come – the gunshot echoing through the forest, his mother unable to follow. There’s a reprieve as slowly Bambi recovers, grows into a stag and falls in love, but only, that is, until the fire. Today the fire is more than we can take, and we cling together, the nits abandoned, as trees crash and animals run screaming from the flames.

  It’s then I hear the phone. It rings above the cacophony of sound, a high insistent calling that I have no choice but to ignore.

  Aoife

  HE’D ASKED HER TO GO WITH HIM WHEN SHE MET HIM IN THE lane, slowed his car, and leant his elbow out, even though she’d told him, straight, she never would again. ‘There’s a place in Cork, down by the docks . . .’ Startled, she remembered her brother Jim’s shebeen, but of course – she’d told him about it on one of their drives, and wasn’t he pulling her leg? Aoife looked at him through the open window. ‘Out drinking,’ she shook her head, ‘and on a Tuesday.’

  ‘Tell me, Aoife, when did you last go dancing?’

  ‘That’s enough now.’ Whatever was between them was in the past.

  She’d watched him drive away. Could see his teasing face in the mirror. He never could take no. She’d turned and walked towards home, slow now, poor Humphrey would rather lie by the stove, but that evening as Aoife started on the meal – ham salad and a bowl of potatoes, sweet and yellow from the ground – she was away with Patrick O’Malley in that long white car, the smell of aftershave and dog, the two of them singing as they sailed along. How many more times would he have to ask before she said: Go on with you. Before she got in?

  ‘Are you listening to me, woman?’ Cash was squinting at her. He looked amused.

  ‘I am always listening.’ The crumble was singed. ‘Just one minute.’ She took it into the pantry, where she did her best to slice off the burnt peaks. ‘What was it you were asking?’ She brought it back with a jug of cream, and it came to her in a flash of luck. ‘What should we do to increase the yield?’

  When the men came the next morning, they were full of it. The car, buckled and twisted, wrapped round a tree. Aoife held tight to the rail of the range, but all the same she felt herself flung up and over, the breath knocked out of her as she crashed against the trunk. ‘No one but himself was hurt.’ They crossed themselves. ‘Praise be to God.’

  The breakfast was prepared. There was only the toast to make, and she watched it with a hawk eye as it turned.

  ‘It was after midnight . . .’

  ‘Woken by it . . .’

  ‘Foley, who lives out by the . . .’

  ‘The collision . . .’

  ‘Instant. That’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘Better that way.’

  ‘It is, so.’

  There was silence then as Cashel and the three men ate. The eggs had hardened, a skin over the yolk, and the mushrooms had shrivelled in the pan.

  ‘You’re a good woman, Mrs Kelly.’ Patsy gazed at her, happy for the excuse, and Tim and Eamon nodded.

  ‘It’s a shocking thing.’ Cash stood beside her as the men filed out. He had his boots on and his farm jacket, and he kissed her, gentle, on the forehead. ‘Have yourself a rest. Later we’ll go to Mrs O’Malley and we’ll pay our respects.’

  Aoife didn’t pay her respects, not that day. She took to her bed and Cash went up without her. The son was there, smart as they’d never seen him, and Mrs O’Malley had put on a spread. Cake and sandwiches and some kind of pie. She must have started baking as soon as she heard the news. Was that decent? The question of it tumbled in Aoife’s thoughts.

  She kept to her bed for two days. She might have stayed there longer, but it was best, she knew it, to get up and escape her dreams, Patrick O’Malley driving through them, from bar to bar, and she with him, his arm around her shoulder, and in every room of every bar there was Rosaleen. The girl raised a toast to them. Good for you, Mummy, she lifted her glass. It’s time you had yourself some fun. But where was the baby? What in God’s name had become of the child?

  Rosaleen

  IT WAS ROSALEEN’S TURN TO GO OUT WITH THE PROFESSOR. SHE could hear him fussing as he came up from the basement. ‘I thought I had Teresa tonight,’ he muttered, ‘is that too much to ask?’

  Rosaleen didn’t blame him. She was no fun, they all knew that, but she had to make an effort or the arrangement was off, and where else was she to go?

  ‘What are we up to then?’ she rallied.

  ‘You girls, can you remember nothing?’ He tapped his stick against the banister. ‘Poulenc. Wigmore Hall.’

  Rosaleen creaked open the front door. It was a stickily warm evening, the trees heavy with spores, the scent of wild raspberry rising from the basement yards. A troupe of boys were playing football, skittering against the railings, while girls scraped a rope against the ground. Rosaleen searched for things to say as they made their way along the street. ‘Was Poulenc a favourite of your wife?’ His wife had played the oboe. They’d held concerts in the house before she died.

  ‘Not particularly,’ he said.

  Conversation stuttered, and stopped. Rosaleen hoped there might be time for a drink. If they managed a drink in the interval too, they wouldn’t have to have one after, and she could pack them both into a cab and speed home to Chelsea, where the other girls – whose night it wasn’t – would be talking and smoking, grateful to have the place to themselves. It had been rumoured that Chloe would be visiting. Chloe Hazell who had once lived in the house, and was talked of with awe; half French, her hair cropped short, she’d left when she was discovered to be pregnant. Rosaleen pressed her nails, sharp, into the palms of her hands. ‘Rosie!’ the Professor reprimanded her as a taxi sailed by, and she mumbled an apology, and strained her eyes the length of the King’s Road.

  They managed one whisky before the concert started, and fuelled with the heat of it they settled into their seats. At least we won’t have to talk. They usually went to the Italian on the corner and then to an out-of-the-way pub where there was little chance of meeting anyone they knew. It was undivided attention the Professor was after, and he made sure that was what he got. The girls moaned about him, shared anecdotes, but were grateful too for the minimal rent, the large rooms and occasional hot water, the kitchen with its dark wood table where they sat up late playing gin rummy. ‘He won’t want to touch, only to look,’ Teresa had assured Rosaleen that first day, secreting her into her room. ‘When you’re feeling perkier, that is.’ She’d gone through to the kitchen to make tea, and while she was alone Rosaleen had kicked off her boots, tugged at her clothes and, wrapping herself in a nightgown, climbed under the covers. Her breasts were leaking, she was seeping blood, but that was nothing to the rip of pain where Isabelle had been.

  ‘What’s up?’ Teresa sat on the edge of the bed and narrowed her eyes.

  Rosaleen h
ad no words to tell her. Instead she recited the lines she’d prepared. She’d fallen ill at Christmas, stayed on at home, and now her job wouldn’t have her back. None of this was strictly a lie. She was weak, she told Teresa, but getting stronger, and so damn grateful to be here or she’d be holed up with Auntie Mavis, and then she might never recover.

  It was a fortnight before Rosaleen was able to get up. The girls – Teresa, Suzette, Diane, Esme – brought her hot toddies and visitors. One of them, Eddie, climbed in through the window in the early mornings, hoping for Teresa’s attention, and, when she turned her back on him, fell asleep wedged between them. Rosaleen clung to the edge of the bed. Her breasts were still bound down under a vest, and she took every chance to escape to the bathroom and change the wet dressings, secreting the bloody pads into the bin, pressing out the milk with the flat of her hand, any thought of her baby causing them to release a fine warm spray. ‘Did he drop you, then?’ Teresa had whispered that first night. ‘Who was it you were with? A foreign gentleman . . .’ She fixed her eyes on the ceiling, trying to catch hold of what she had heard, and then maybe she remembered, because she rolled towards her and laid an arm across the cottony quilt. ‘We’ll look after you.’ Hot tears had swelled under Rosaleen’s lids.

  She hardly dared think of this as the music started up. A flute trilled, drums boomed, and she placed a hand on her soft stomach. There was a light reprieve and the flute floated high above the strings as she tugged the denim of her dress towards her knees. It was the dress she’d worn the first day she got up, short-sleeved with buttons down the front. It had no waist and had always been loose, but even so she was surprised to find how easily it slipped on. Where was Patricia? She examined her silhouette, and although she was unusually pale, and her hair had lost its sheen, it seemed that with the return of her suitcase she’d been reunited with herself. ‘Enchanted to meet you.’ The Professor had welcomed her as if she’d just arrived. He liked a new girl, and he’d booked her that first evening, where she managed a bowl of minestrone and was relieved to find he required only that she let him talk.

  ‘Beautiful music,’ he declared now as they stood crammed into the bar. He drained his whisky and gave her a shrewd look. ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Rosaleen nodded. She’d been startled by the audience’s applause, had been standing in the French pub, staring over at their table, where Felix sat, not with his wife but with a girl, willowy and fair, every ounce of his attention settled on her. She’d stood, unable to move, and it was only when the girl looked up, dazzled, a flush of red high up on each cheek, that she turned around and ran. Blindly she’d swung out through the door and careered through Soho, on into Mayfair, where she avoided Felix’s old gallery, across the lanes of Marble Arch and into Hyde Park. She kept up her pace, past the Serpentine, through Knightsbridge, never slowing until she came out on the long straight safety of the King’s Road.

  Rosaleen shook herself and flicked through the programme. ‘Which is your favourite piece?’

  ‘My favourite, let me see . . .’ The Professor was away, describing for her the scope of Poulenc’s work, his religious influence, his versatility – chamber music, orchestral compositions, opera – as she accompanied her own destroyed self through the stuccoed squares of Chelsea to the Professor’s house at World’s End. ‘Listen carefully.’ He fixed her with stern attention. ‘Then you can tell me which piece you like best.’

  The second half continued much as before, but towards the end was a sonata for oboe and piano, Élégie, composed short months before Poulenc’s death. Regret, sweetness, clouds closing in. The music had her heart and it was wringing it. She pushed a fist against her mouth, but she was walking down that corridor, the oboe weeping, the piano urging her to run. ‘I’ll take her now.’ Sister’s smile was greedy, and the oboe rose up on a high wire as Isabelle was wrenched away. Rosaleen’s teeth grazed her knuckle. Every note flayed her skin. She choked, and bit down hard, but her grief was bursting at the seams. Now what will I do? Her skin turned cold. Where will I go? She’d seen the Professor inform a girl she was not only messy but inconvenient. She wiped her face on her bare arm, sniffed into her elbow, and felt a hand nudging hers. ‘Take this.’ It was a handkerchief, and glancing at the Professor, she saw a tear slip below the frame of his glasses.

  Afterwards they were both silent. She found a cab and helped him to climb in, and as they rumbled through the summer streets, the moon low in the light sky, the music travelled with them.

  ‘Will you play cards?’ she offered as they came in through the door. She could hear the chatter of the girls in the kitchen. The old man shook his head. ‘Not tonight,’ he said, and he descended to the burrow of his room.

  Chloe was sitting in the armchair, her child asleep on her lap. ‘Rosaleen. It must be?’ A flick of recognition lit her eyes. ‘We’ve been talking about you.’

  ‘Oh?’ She paled, but Teresa whispered, ‘How was the old goat?’ and the others turned, eager for entertainment.

  ‘The whisky helped.’ She gave them that. ‘The second, even more.’ There was laughter and agreement, and a joint was passed around.

  They stayed up late, chatting and smoking, interrupted by the occasional banging of the Professor as he struck a stick against his ceiling. ‘Sleep in with us,’ Teresa told Chloe as they retreated to their room, and tucking her lion-headed boy on to a quilt folded in the corner, she climbed into the bed and lay with her silk skin, warm, between them.

  Rosaleen woke with the chattering of birds to find Chloe’s body folded round her. She tensed with alarm and did her best to ease away, but a sleepy voice rose from the shared pillow, so gentle that she stopped. ‘What did you have?’

  ‘What did . . . ?’

  ‘You can always tell, if you’ve been through it.’

  Rosaleen lay still. ‘A girl.’

  ‘As soon as I saw you. Shh.’ The well of her tears seemed never to run dry. ‘It’s all right.’

  But it wasn’t all right. It would never be all right.

  ‘You’ll feel better . . . ,’ Chloe insisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘When you have another one.’

  Rosaleen twisted round to face her. ‘I’m not like you. Not brave.’

  ‘You’re brave.’ Chloe’s eyes looked into hers. ‘Don’t wait too long. Believe me, I know.’ She leant forward and put her soft mouth, for a moment, on hers, and to Rosaleen’s surprise they drifted back to sleep.

  EACH MORNING WHEN ROSALEEN WOKE she made an inventory of her baby. The starfish hands, the lock of hair, the petal of her mouth. She traced Isabelle’s ears, the high creased shoulders, the narrow legs. She counted, once again, the pearl tips of her nails, and in her palm she held a heel, feeling the soft thud of its kick. For those minutes, for that half hour, she kept her baby close, but then the bed heaved, Teresa sat up, Eddie was at the window. ‘Go away!’ Teresa harangued him, more often now than not, and when he’d climbed in anyway, and fallen hard asleep, she leant across to Rosaleen. ‘I just can’t,’ she whispered. Eddie was whippet-thin and pale. He had the look of a man who’d be grateful even for a kiss.

  ‘He’s lovely,’ Rosaleen said.

  ‘Maybe I’ve turned lesbian.’ She giggled, they both did, and then Teresa asked, solemn, ‘Would you?’

  ‘With Eddie?’

  ‘Did you, with your artist?’

  They lay in bed, and Rosaleen told her how it had been with Felix. How time had warped and lost itself, how once they’d lain down for thirty minutes and when they’d next looked up five hours had passed. It was after midnight and the restaurant they were going to was closed. Hungry, they’d walked through London, their arms entwined, stopping to kiss at every kerb, arriving as the sun rose over the meat market at Smithfield so ravenous they’d ordered three breakfasts, plates piled high with black pudding and poached egg. She described for Teresa how he’d made love to her, gentle and then fierce, the sparks that travelled through her when he stroked her skin
.

  ‘Stroked how?’

  ‘So light, his fingertips were air . . .’

  ‘Try it,’ she murmured, and ignoring the sleeping Eddie, Teresa flung away her slip and rolled on to her front. Rosaleen sat astride her.

  ‘Bony!’ Teresa protested, but Rosaleen was comfortable on the pad of her friend’s bum, and she trailed her fingers across Teresa’s shoulders, along the skin of her arms. Lighter. Firmer. She used the very edge of her nails. Felix had shivered, goosebumps rising, a fire that bucked them both. Teresa lay stolid as blancmange. ‘They must have slippered it out of me.’ She yawned, and then, quiet, ‘Why do you not see him?’

  Rosaleen lay back down on her side. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Never?’

  She took so long to answer that Teresa began to dress. She had a job typing for a publisher’s, and it was some time since the alarm had rattled its tin ears. ‘Got to get to work.’

  Got to get a job, Rosaleen thought wearily when she’d gone. She’d written to Betty in the post room, only to learn her place was filled. She bought a paper and searched through. There was a health-food shop opening in Camden. An antique arcade needed part-time staff. She took out her old notebook and looked over ideas. Skirt lengths in sixties Britain. Support for servicemen. The first man on the moon? Patricia, she added. Carmel. These weren’t stories people wanted told.

  Another week passed, and she took a job at a pub on the Fulham Road. ‘All right, sweetheart?’ the regulars said, appraising her. ‘Who do we have here?’

  Soon they were clicking their fingers, whispering invitations, telling her to take one for herself. Rosaleen was practised in keeping herself secret, and she thought of Margaret and how she’d taught her to tuck away the money, not too little or too much, all the while evading the lumbering body of the landlord, who did his best to brush against her as she moved between the spirits and the pumps. My dad, he was landlord of the Black Horse in Brixton; she thought that might jolt him into keeping those hands to himself, but she couldn’t bring herself to use her father’s name, not since she’d seen it, signed at the end of the letter. You’ve made your bed. Sister Ignatius had handed it over with her case. Now you must lie on it. She hadn’t at first recognised his writing. It was Mummy who had kept in touch through all the years of school, but it was him all right because, after requesting that she never show her face again at Barraghmore – her mother would not bear the shame of it – he’d signed it, Mr Cashel Kelly.