by Tara Heavey
‘What will we call him?’ Martin asked.
‘How do you know it’s going to be a him?’
‘How could it not be?’
She smiled. She felt the same way.
‘How about Martin?’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t that be a little confusing?’
‘It worked for my father and me.’ He was defensive.
She didn’t care. There was no way her son was having such a Catholic name. But she’d save that argument for another day.
They’d been getting on quite well since they’d found out she was pregnant, both anticipating the difference a baby would make to their lives. But everything changed once she started to show. He would stare at her belly, an odd, unfathomable expression on his face. He grew sullen and withdrawn, and stopped touching her. She began to feel isolated again. Fearful. Were the first years of marriage so difficult for everyone? She’d never have guessed it could be so hard. If she didn’t know better, she would have said he resented the new life growing inside his wife, was jealous even, ridiculous as the notion sounded. How could he be jealous of someone who didn’t even exist yet? His own flesh and blood, for God’s sake.
The late nights away from her grew more frequent again. The heavy drinking, briefly suspended, began again in earnest. He would roll in spoiling for a fight and she, in her heightened emotional state, was increasingly willing to give him what he wanted. Ready, in fact, to goad him. She felt that her vulnerable condition gave her a superior edge, made her, ironically, invulnerable.
‘Here he is,’ she said one night, easing herself out of her chair, in the way peculiar to heavily pregnant women. ‘Stinking of booze as usual. You should be ashamed of yourself, treating your wife this way. I am carrying your child, you know.’
She was indignant, self-righteous. Martin said nothing as he stood unsteadily in the hall, eyeing her warily.
‘Is this how you’re planning to behave when our child is born? A fine example you’re going to be.’ She came right up to him, standing close. And her eyes widened with incredulity.
‘What’s that smell?’
‘What smell?’ He looked a bit scared.
‘You know what smell. It’s perfume! It is, isn’t it? You’ve been with a woman.’
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’
‘Don’t you call me stupid. You have, haven’t you? You’re reeking of it.’
Her voice rose several octaves, out of control, hysterical.
‘How could you do that to me? I’m your wife. I’m having your baby.’
She drew back her hand and slapped him across the face, feeling as if her life had descended into some bad piece of melodrama. Without missing a beat, Martin slapped her back. Except his slap was in a different category. While he experienced a light sting, she was sent thundering into the wall. At first she didn’t know what had happened. She’d never been struck before. She felt as if someone had tried to twist her head from her neck. For a few seconds, she remained where she was, dazed and stunned, then slid to the floor, her knees falling to the side, her eyes blinking repeatedly.
In an instant Martin was all over her. ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus, I’m sorry. Are you all right? Can you get up? Oh, Jesus. Here, I’ll help you, you’re all right, you’re all right.’
She focused on his unnaturally white face as he scooped her up and carried her into the sitting room. He laid her tenderly on the couch and placed cushions behind her back and head. She continued to focus on his face, his jawline twitching. She couldn’t fully comprehend what had happened. It was so far outside her usual frame of reference. Should she have seen it coming after the previous incident, which, she realized now, she had successfully put at the back of her mind?
‘Oh, my darling, you’re all right, you’re all right,’ Martin was muttering over and over, half to her and half to himself.
‘The baby,’ she said.
‘What about it? Is something wrong?’
‘I don’t know, but…’
‘Do you feel any different?’
‘Well, no. But I think I should be checked by a doctor.’
‘No! No reason to bother a doctor. None at all. You’re fine. I’ll look after you.’ He left the room like a man on a mission. She lay on the couch, shivering slightly. Then her teeth started to chatter, which caused a shooting pain in the bottom left half of her face. She reached up with shaking fingers and touched her cheek. Her skin felt hot and she could feel it throbbing. Martin returned. He was carrying a frozen steak and the bedspread from upstairs. ‘Here. Hold this against your face.’
She did as he had instructed and felt some soothing. He arranged the bedspread around her, tucking it up to her chin and around her feet, from which he gently removed her slippers.
‘You hit me,’ she said, eyes brimming, teeth still chattering.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘What do you mean, you –’
‘I know I did, but it was only a slap. And you slapped me first.’ He attempted a sickly smile.
‘And that makes it all right?’ She started to cry properly.
‘Oh, God. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He cradled her, laying his cheek against her good side. ‘I’ll never do anything like that again. I swear to you, Marnie. I’ll never hit you again. I’ll change. It’ll be all right. Everything’s going to be all right, you and the baby.’ He rocked her back and forth and she cried in his arms.
‘The perfume,’ she said.
‘There’s no other woman, Marnie. I swear to God. There’s only you. No other woman but you. I was in a club, that’s all. You know how you get crushed up against everybody.’
She wanted desperately to believe him, his tender words balm to her aching spirit. The throbbing in her cheek subsided to a dull ache and she ceased to shake. Martin sat with his arms around her for an hour or more, the room, the house growing dark around them. Until he felt she believed him.
In time the fingermarks faded and her cheek was no longer tender. Martin continued to be attentive and remorseful. No more late nights. He came home when he said he would. If there had been a woman, she was put on the back burner. The baby was all right: he stayed where he was until ten days before his due date. Martin wasn’t present for the birth. He was relegated to the smoke-filled waiting room with all the other expectant fathers. But he came in as soon as he was let and allowed Myrtle to call their son Lance, either out of a sense of guilt or some upwardly mobile tendency within him.
Lance had his father’s hair but not his eyes. His eyes were Myrtle’s – slate-blue-grey eyes that saw the world for how it was and not how they wanted it to be. He was quite a sedate baby, which was just as well, because how would she have coped otherwise, what with everything else the situation had thrown at her? Martin’s strange moods – one minute delighted with her and the new baby, the next sulky and petulant, as if he were the older sibling instead of the father, jealous and vying for her attention. Until this point she had only needed to be wary of his moods when he had drink taken. But now, as if aching nipples and eyes falling out of her head with tiredness weren’t enough, she had his mercurial rantings to put up with.
‘You’re giving that child too much attention.’
‘You’re spoiling him. Let him cry.’
And: ‘You care more about that baby than you do about me.’
Of course I bloody well do, Myrtle felt like screaming. What do you expect?
Because the love she’d had for Martin had almost run out. Like an egg-timer with the tiniest quantity of sand left to trickle through. He’d squeezed the life out of it with his big, rough hands.
And she’d loved him so much.
She wept for her lost love, so strongly held. She missed it and mourned it. And it could have been his for ever if only he’d known how to keep it. All that she had now was resentment. Another dull ache to put up with. Perhaps it would get better as Lance got older and she wasn’t so tired all the time. Nowadays, if someone commented on how handsome or entert
aining her husband was, she didn’t feel proud. Instead she felt anger and a powerful urge to blurt out the truth. She did this once, when the urge to unburden herself became too great.
The woman was called Frances. She was the wife of a colleague of Martin’s. She and Myrtle often found themselves thrown together at dinner parties. She’d had a baby girl around the same time that Myrtle had given birth to Lance, and the two women would visit each other’s homes in a bid to stave off the madness that often besets the first-time mother, at home alone with her baffling baby.
Myrtle was really just trying to find out if her marriage was normal. That was how it started.
‘How’s Bill adjusting to fatherhood?’
‘Oh, he loves it. He’s wonderful with her. I’m sure Martin’s the same.’
‘Not really, no.’ She was sick of lying, trotting out the accepted untruth just to please.
Frances looked a little taken aback, as well she might. Myrtle was not playing the game. ‘Maybe he needs more time to get to know Lance.’ Her words were designed to reassure herself as much as Myrtle. ‘It doesn’t come as easy to men as it does to us.’
She looked so smug and snug in her feminine role that Myrtle wanted to hit her. But she couldn’t do that so she slapped her verbally instead. ‘I sometimes think Martin’s jealous of his own baby. Do you ever think that about Bill?’
Frances looked shocked. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘He’s jealous of all the attention I give Lance. He was even jealous of him when he was in the womb. He hit me once, you know, when I was pregnant.’
‘I’m sure –’
‘He did. Flattened me up against a wall. Did your husband ever do anything like that to you?’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, no.’
‘So it’s not normal, then?’
‘Of course not. I’d better go.’ Frances was gathering up her things. It was clear that she didn’t want to know – feared getting involved.
After that Myrtle didn’t see much of her. She didn’t tell anyone else. And the wound in her soul festered and turned into an oozing, weeping carbuncle.
It wasn’t all bad. As Lance got older the less wholly dependent he became on Myrtle, and this suited Martin. He liked to play with the boy – rough-and-tumble games, throwing, tickling and flinging, that caused him to squeal with delight. Myrtle was glad for Lance that he had an alternative to her sedate reading-colouring-walking routine. It was true that children needed two parents – a mother and a father. Although Martin never talked of his own father. And, come to think of it, her brother Roger hated theirs. She hoped the cycle could be broken.
Her more pressing concern, though, was whether or not her son needed a sibling. She had never intended him to be an only child and, given the amount of time it had taken her to conceive him, perhaps they shouldn’t delay too long. Her humming and haaing came to an end one day when Martin announced gruffly: ‘Lance needs a little brother.’
That was decided, then.
It took six months this time, a lot less than before. Things were good. Martin was happy and so was Lance. Father and son patently adored one another. Myrtle felt happy about her growing family and newly optimistic about the future. But this happy phase in her life was to be short-lived. Because, again, the problems began when her pregnancy started to show. She wasn’t sure why this should be so but it was. The constant reminder of her condition seemed too much for Martin. He became surly again, eyeing her belly suspiciously, as if it was an intruder in their home, as if it was none of his doing. The drinking began again. The staying out. She accepted it all with a sense of dread. Lance was the only recipient of Martin’s smiles – that was when he saw him. More often than not, he’d been asleep for hours by the time Martin fell in the door. There was a new quality to his drinking. It was getting worse. He was getting worse. She wasn’t sure if he was drinking more or just wasn’t able to hold it as well as he once had. But it certainly seemed to have a hold on him.
She was four months pregnant. She liked to talk to the baby. To hold her hand on her stomach and feel its first flutterings. It had become her habit to go to bed early and feign sleep when Martin came in. The pregnancy gave her an excuse and, besides, she was exhausted anyway. Usually it worked and he left her alone. But not that night.
She tensed when she heard his footfall on the stairs – heavy, uneven, ominous. Normally he stayed downstairs and drank some more, falling into a drunken stupor on the couch. She kept her eyelids resolutely closed as he entered the room and sat heavily on the bed.
‘Are you awake?’
She lay still as a stone.
‘Marnie, wake up.’ He shook her shoulder.
Still she didn’t react.
‘Wake up, you stupid cunt.’ And, with one almighty shove, he pushed her out of the bed.
She struck her forehead on the bedside table and lay stunned for several seconds, vaguely aware that he was coming around to her side of the bed. She looked up at him in abject shock. ‘What are you doing, Martin?’
‘That’ll teach you to ignore me, English bitch.’ And he kicked her hard in the stomach.
It was a girl. Tiny, perfectly formed and dead. She would have called her Rose. She wouldn’t be able to have any more children.
She stayed in the hospital for a week, staring at the wall as Martin sat on the bed and talked. He was the tender Martin she’d once known. Attentive. Above all, remorseful. While he unloaded his guilt, she weighed up her options. By the end of the week she concluded that she didn’t have any. It was the 1960s. At that time, no one of Myrtle’s acquaintance was separated, divorced or a single parent. She hadn’t spoken to her parents since she’d got married. She loved her brother, Roger, but he was still young, feckless and broke. She was fond of Martin’s mother and his family, but they would hardly take her in if she left their son and brother. What female friendships she had forged since landing on this godforsaken island were superficial. And Martin had said he’d stop drinking and that he’d never harm her again. She didn’t believe him but it was all she had. On the seventh day, he brought Lance in to see her.
‘When are you coming home, Mummy?’
‘Now.’ She got out of bed and started to dress. She met Martin’s eye.
‘Thank you,’ he mouthed.
35
Aoife and Seth had spent the morning busily ignoring one another. Aoife, digging up potatoes as if her life depended on it. Seth, messing around by the pond and achieving very little. It was pretty uncomfortable. Aoife would have left a long time ago but she was waiting for the two women from the Mothers’ Union. She had taken Mrs Prendergast up on her offer. She’d been in such a tizz at the prospect of organizing the harvest festival – or the autumn party, as Kathy and Liam insisted on calling it – that the idea of two experienced pairs of hands had been too tempting to turn down. She hoped that she hadn’t been too hasty. She also hoped that Seth would clear off home. He wasn’t even doing anything.
‘You must be Aoife.’
She turned to see two women picking their way daintily through her vegetable patch. They tiptoed around the turnips and greeted her at the garlic.
‘You must be…’
‘Joyce and Pearl.’ Joyce was the spokeswoman.
‘Pearl, Joyce, delighted to meet you.’
They all shook hands rather formally and Aoife felt herself on familiar territory. She recognized these women, although she had never met them before in her life. They were the women of her childhood. The women who worked the stalls at church fêtes. The women who ran committees. And Joyce was a dead ringer for Aoife’s first headmistress. Despite her Catholic upbringing, she had attended the local Church of England school for reasons of reputation and convenience. And these women were unmistakably and indisputably Protestant. She couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was about them – other than that they were in the Mothers’ Union – but she knew she was right.
‘I must say, Aoife, I’ve heard a lot about this garden but none o
f the descriptions did it justice. It’s simply glorious. And the vegetable patch is magnificent. I can’t remember the last time I saw such healthy chard.’
‘Do you grow your own?’
‘Oh, yes. Have done for years.’
Here was someone else who knew more about gardening than she did.
They all looked around at the crunching sound on the gravel path. It was Seth, grinning expectantly.
‘Joyce. Pearl. This is Seth.’
‘Ladies.’ Seth proffered his hand and smiled his best smile.
‘Joyce and Pearl are going to help with the autumn party.’
‘Oh.’ Pearl spoke for the first time. ‘I thought it was a harvest festival.’
‘Well, autumn party, harvest festival – it’s the same thing, really.’
‘Actually, no, it isn’t.’
There was an embarrassing silence. Pearl might have been a quietly spoken woman but, Aoife noticed now, she had the mad look in her eye of a religious zealot.
‘So,’ said Joyce, to everyone’s relief, ‘tell us what you’ve got planned so far. Or perhaps we should discuss this inside the house.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to disturb Mrs Prendergast. It’s still quite early.’
‘Nonsense. Myrtle’s always been an early riser. I expect she’s been up for hours.’
‘Myrtle!’ said Seth. ‘You’re joking me. No wonder she kept quiet about it.’
Aoife gave him a withering look. ‘Ladies, why don’t I show you around the garden?’
As they walked away from Seth and the vegetables, Joyce giggled in the high-pitched way peculiar to some women of a certain age. ‘Oh dear. I hope we haven’t let the cat out of the bag on poor Myrtle.’
‘Not at all. I’m sure she won’t mind.’
‘Are you sure we shouldn’t just look in on her first? I’d hate to appear rude.’
