The Tube was filled with sour, dead-faced commuters, stumbling through their trip to work like automatons. Helen stared at them, amazed that they could look so grim when life was so full of wonder and joy. She wanted to tell them all that no matter how bad they were feeling now, some amazing and thrilling piece of news might be waiting for them when they got home that night.
She had the urge to go round the carriage, telling every last one of them that only yesterday she had felt alone, unloved and irrelevant, and today she was suddenly a grandmother. There was a tiny, adorable little baby curled up somewhere in this city who was hers: her grandchild.
Helen hadn’t consciously changed her mind about Ella. She hadn’t even really had a chance to think about it. She had simply gone to bed confused and overwhelmed by the news, and had woken up happy. It was as simple as that. In an ideal world, the circumstances would be different, but nothing could be done about that now, and her dream of anything remotely resembling an ideal world with regard to what Paul might do with his life had been shattered long ago. He was her only child and he was gay, therefore she would never be a grandmother. She had been reconciled to this for a long time (if you can call it reconciled when the idea in fact made her sad every single time she saw a baby or heard one or thought about one), but now, out of the blue, almost magically, her dearest wish had been granted. All her grievances and complaints about the manner in which it had been done, and about the confusing life into which the baby had been born, when put up against the fact of this living, breathing baby, felt like mere quibbles.
She existed, she was alive, and Helen was her grandmother. This was more than Helen had ever dared hope for. Now she had Ella, she wouldn’t demand anything more of anyone. Helen’s life had been miraculously blessed and she would not, she vowed to herself, forget it.
With this sudden, novel surge of happiness pumping through her veins, a gate opened in her mind, and she allowed herself to acknowledge how alien this sensation was. Up to this day, for many, many years, she had been unhappy. Only now it was over could she admit it. She had never got over Larry; the years on her own had been one long tangle of anxiety; the marriage to Clive was nothing more than a shell to hide in. She had held back these thoughts, year in, year out, afraid of what they might do to her if she let them in, but now she was ready to end the denial. She was strong enough. She had a future to live for.
Only a few minutes earlier, she had wanted to walk round the compartment telling the commuters that life was better than they thought. Now, she realised, people were staring at her because she was crying.
She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue and wiped her face. Whether these were tears of misery, prompted by the sudden admission to herself of her own unhappiness, or tears of joy at her new role as a grandmother, or simply tears of relief that her suffering was over, she didn’t know. All she knew was that it felt good. She cried, wiped, blew her nose, then cried some more. She didn’t care what the other passengers thought. If she wanted to cry, she’d cry. She’d earned the right.
Stepping into the John Lewis baby department had a strange effect on Helen’s physiognomy. She instantly felt lighter and younger. Around her were pregnant women and harassed-looking couples peering wearily at unfamiliar bits of lurid kit, while Helen felt she was almost floating. As if guided by divine inspiration, Helen quickly found herself in front of a rack of minuscule Babygros, each one barely the length of her forearm.
She hurriedly reached for more tissues. The tears were coming again. She took four pink Babygros, two newborn, two 3–6 months, and walked away before she made a scene. Suddenly, she was face to face with a rack of socks. The teeniest, tiniest socks she could ever remember seeing. Had Paul’s feet ever really been that small?
She gave up on self-control and allowed herself to sob. People here would be used to public emotion. It was probably a rarity for anyone to look at these socks and not cry. She bought a pink fistful, wondering if it would be weird to keep a pair for herself. Then she saw a tiny pink jumper with a picture of a bunny rabbit on it, which she simply couldn’t walk past without buying, as well as a woolly hat to go with it and a pair of booties that made a colour match so perfect it would have been madness not to get them.
She then went to the ground floor to get some knitting needles and some balls of pink wool. There was no time to knit anything before the visit today, but she could at least get started. Then she thought it would be good to give something personal, so she also bought a needle and a box of brightly coloured thread, and took the lift back up to the baby section to get some plain white bibs. She couldn’t remember how long embroidery took (she had no memory of doing it since school), but she thought she might at least be able to stitch an ‘E’ or maybe a little picture of a cat on to one, so that Ella would get something that had Helen’s love sewn into it. A first little thing to bond them together. A token of the years of devotion to come.
Then she went to the toy department.
Helen was carrying two large bags and had spent over a hundred pounds by the time she left the shop. The money, however, meant nothing to her. This was beyond money. This was beyond everything. This was a new, fresh, unblemished, uncynical, perfect human being to love: the closest real life ever got to the miraculous.
She arrived back at the Hoxton house still on a dizzy high and rang the bell. There was no answer. She waited and waited, but no one came.
Helen took her mobile out of her handbag and switched it on. She dialled Paul’s office.
‘Isn’t Andre there?’ he said, when she told him she was locked out.
‘No.’
‘He must be at college. Sorry. I forgot.’
‘But I thought you were taking the day off. What about the visit?’
‘That’s what I was about to tell you.’
‘What?’
‘I was all set to take the day off. I was. I can see how important it is to you.’
‘But?’
‘But they said no.’
‘What?’
’They said no.’
‘What do you mean they said no?’
‘I don’t know how else to put it.’
‘How can they do that?’
‘I thought they would. I tried to warn you. It’s not Andrea.’
‘Which one’s Andrea?’
‘The mother. I don’t think she would have minded. But it was Rebecca who answered the phone. She’s the other one, and she’s always been a bit funny about me keeping my distance, and she’s the one who wanted to get all exact about rules for everything and everyone’s rights, and my name not being on the birth certificate. She’s just very intense and serious about it, which is understandable, I suppose. And she got me to make lots of promises about what I would and wouldn’t do, and what claims I might make on the baby, and when I said you wanted to visit, she said no.’
‘But she can’t.’
‘She did.’
‘But she’s my granddaughter. I have rights.’
‘Let’s not have that conversation again. I just want you to know I did my best.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘I did!’
‘One phone call is your best, is it? You’re ridiculous and lazy, and frankly at the moment I think you’re being extremely stupid. What’s their address?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Come on.’
‘I don’t think –’
‘I’m standing on the doorstep of your house, locked out, carrying two bags of presents for my granddaughter, and I’m not going to stand here for the rest of the day. What’s the damn address?’
‘You can’t just –’
‘I can and I will.’
‘They said no, Mum.’
‘They said no to you, not to me. If they’re going to say no to me, they can say it to my face. Now tell me.’
‘I don’t think I should.’
‘I’m going to give you one more chance. This isn’t about you and the lesbians. It’s a
bout me and Ella. Now I’ve had enough of this conversation. If you don’t tell me in the next ten seconds, I’m . . . I’m going to start smashing the windows of your house. One. Two. Three.’
‘Mum, don’t be ridiculous. They’ll turn you away.’
‘Fine. They can do it to my face, then, so I’ll need the address’.
‘Mum –’
‘Four. Five. I’ve found a nice big stone. Six.’
‘Mum!’
‘Seven. Eight. Nine. Don’t test me, Paul.’
‘This is crazy.’
‘Nine and a half.’
Helen kicked Paul’s recycling box, which produced a gratifyingly glassy clatter.
‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING!’ shrieked Paul.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’
He gave her the address. Helen thanked him, told him his windows were untouched and walked straight back to the Tube station, buying an A–Z on the way.
beyond love
The address was in Stoke Newington, where Helen had never been before. Not knowing her way around this part of the city, she got a train to Finsbury Park and stumbled around the bus terminus for a few minutes, trying in vain to find someone who wasn’t too scary to ask for help, then, assisted by nothing more than a faded and filthy map, climbed on to a bus with only the vaguest confidence that it would take her in the right direction.
Helen sat bolt upright in her seat, anxiously following on her A–Z as the bus inched past Turkish, Ethiopian and Moroccan restaurants, alongside innumerable small supermarkets selling unfamiliar fruit and misshapen vegetables to people who, for all she knew, were genuine Turks, Ethiopians and Moroccans.
After a while, the density of shops thinned out and the bus drove past a park, to an area that reminded Helen slightly of Hoxton, having the same mix of ominous high-rise council estates and the kind of health-food shops where you can buy kumquats and organic polenta. This was Stoke Newington.
The address turned out to be a flat above a second-hand bookshop. The door was windowless and unadorned, at first sight looking more like a fire exit than an entrance to a home. There were two buzzers, one with a smudged, semi-legible, consonant-heavy surname, the other saying ‘Andrea + Rebecca’. Helen was in the right place. But she couldn’t ring. Now she was finally here, her confidence faltered, for the first time all day.
It occurred to her that she had perhaps already invested too much in the idea of this child, from whose life she could quite easily be banished. She had let herself imagine that she was transformed into a grandmother, when in fact her condition was still hanging in the balance. The next conversation would decide it.
What she chose to say, whether or not she managed to make these women like her, might have some bearing on the outcome, but essentially the matter was out of her hands. If they categorically did not want her to have a relationship with her grandchild, nothing she could do would make any difference. She could ask, she could beg, but she could not demand or insist upon anything.
A few doors down, Helen spotted a pub with a picnic-style bench on the pavement. She decided to sit there for a while, have a cup of tea and watch the door – not in a sinister way, just to see if there were any comings or goings, just to settle her nerves and allow herself to feel comfortable in this unfamiliar environment.
If she could catch a glimpse of one of these women first, she’d know what she was up against. When someone came out, she might even be able to see where they were going, and find a way to get into conversation with them. In fact, that was probably her only chance. She couldn’t make her first approach from behind that blank door, speaking through a crackly entryphone. She couldn’t allow such a critical conversation to take place so impersonally.
Two cups of tea and one very modest sherry later, the door opened. The first thing to emerge was a pram. Helen’s pulse surged. Her granddaughter! Helen had been so intent on the way she was going to approach the mother(s), she’d almost forgotten that her waiting tactic would possibly also yield a first glimpse of Ella. From this distance, Helen could see nothing of the baby inside the pram, but she already felt herself palpitating with love.
After a brief struggle with the threshold and the heavy door, a woman, who had to be either Andrea or Rebecca, came into view. If this was what a lesbian looked like, thought Helen, she had no way of knowing how many others she had met before.
She had known the odd lesbian on the Soho party scene in the sixties, but in those days there was a uniform. Or not a uniform, exactly, but a look. She hadn’t even known what it meant when she met her first lesbian, but once you clapped eyes on one, it didn’t take much explaining. Larry had always been particularly keen on them, and tried several times to get one back to the marital bed for a threesome, but without any success. A girl with short blonde hair and ruby lips had once told Helen that she’d gladly come, but only on condition that Larry would be locked outside in the garden. If the plan hadn’t been quite so impracticable, Helen might even have said yes.
Andrea (or was it Rebecca?) walked straight towards Helen. As she got closer, Helen could see she was attractive, with a thin, intelligent face and stunning, deep-brown eyes. The pram, unfortunately, was high, and Helen’s bench was low. As her grandchild was wheeled past her, Helen still couldn’t see in without standing or craning her neck. Though it took all her self-control to refrain, she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself yet, so she forced herself to stay seated, and to look away as they passed.
She could even smell them as they went by, in a subtly glorious cloud of fecund, milky mother-babyness. She had not smelt that aroma for years, not consciously, and had certainly not been part of it as she was now. As she took this first secret sniff of these two strangers, she thought to herself, ‘You are my family, and you don’t even know it.’
She stood and followed, keeping her distance, watching closely as this woman and her grandchild went into various food shops, buying small bags of this and that, before suddenly turning round and walking straight towards her again.
Helen momentarily panicked, and almost dived behind a van to conceal herself, but realised just in time that the best way to stay unobtrusive was simply to keep walking. She had noticed while following them down the street that it was quite normal for women of her age to gaze with undisguised curiosity into passing prams, so this time, as they walked by, she allowed herself her first look at Ella.
She was asleep on her back, with her arms up, as if surrendering, though her limbs were so small that her tiny fists didn’t reach any higher than her head. She was so deeply asleep that her features had crumpled together, with a pout and a frown of total concentration. Helen’s glimpse was only fleeting, but if she were never to see the child again for the rest of her life, it was a face she would never forget. She had never known such a brief instant to burn itself so irrevocably into her mind. She had never seen anything more beautiful.
First there was Larry, then there was Paul, now there was Ella. For the first time in thirty-four years, Helen felt in her heart the exquisite, horrifying plummet of falling suddenly, irreversibly in love.
She had simply forgotten how to deal with emotion of this magnitude. She felt like an Eskimo dumped in the middle of New York, struggling to make sense of the view, straining to compute a new sense of scale. It was all too much, and yet not enough. She wanted to stop time and have a chance to comprehend what she was feeling, and at the same time yearned to race forwards into the future to experience more of it.
What she wanted most of all was to know the feeling of Ella in her arms. She wanted to hold her close and smell her neck. If she could have that, just for one minute, her life’s share of happiness would have been fully dealt out to her. It would be enough. There would be more, with luck, but she wouldn’t expect it or demand it. Anything further would be an additional, fortuitous blessing. For now, all she needed was that cuddle, a single dose of grandmotherhood that would lift her to the summit of elation.
A gap had now o
pened up between them. Helen turned and followed Ella and her mother back home, though to her surprise, Andrea/Rebecca walked past her front door and on to the park, where she made a small circuit round a duck pond, then sat at a secluded bench and pulled out a book from under the pram.
Helen hovered. She had three choices. She could hide and watch from a distance, she could go and sit next to her, or she could walk on past for one last look, then head home to plan a more careful approach for a later date. The one thing she couldn’t do was stand there in the middle of the path, staring and dithering.
This had been a bizarre week. Helen had never known her self-confidence to soar and plummet like this on a daily basis. Her predictable, boring life had been shattered. There was suddenly no knowing what would happen tomorrow. If her legs were capable of carrying her to that bench and sitting down next to the woman who had borne her grandchild, she had to do it. She might never have the opportunity or the willpower again.
Still carrying a hefty John Lewis bag in either hand, trying not to worry if Andrea/Rebecca would notice that this was their third encounter, Helen approached the bench. Her legs felt frail, her lungs suddenly incapable of pulling in air to a regular rhythm. Doing her best to conceal the psychological mayhem rampaging through her brain, Helen took a seat on the vacant half of the bench and let out the type of sigh she thought a woman of her age might make when taking a rest from carrying heavy shopping bags.
Andrea/Rebecca didn’t look up from her book. Helen didn’t try to catch her eye. For a long time, Helen simply sat there, staring into space. Was this suspicious behaviour, she wondered? How long could a person legitimately sit on a bench staring into space without seeming like a tramp?
A mewling sound emanated from the pram, a tiny, muffled whine like a squeaky door. Andrea/Rebecca put down her book, stood, stretched, and as the mewl built to a howl, lifted Ella out.
Otherhood Page 21
