Don’t leave me darling. Please don’t leave.
Chapter Sixty-Four
False Spring
Crocuses come. Millions of them, breaking through the soil in the park and flushing mauve and orange to the horizon. Early narcissi nod minuets in flirtatious air. The sun breaks through the clouds and stripes the hillside, brings promise of spring, and it makes me want to cry. It’s so beautiful, this country: so beautiful and haughty and impenetrable.
Lucy Hunstanon-Wattestone is christened at Bourton Allhallows parish church on a Sunday morning after Matins, the congregation swelled to the power of three by the four dozen guests who come to see her rite of passage. She wears the Wattestone christening gown, two-hundred-year-old lace that pours over her mother’s arms and down towards the ground like foaming water. We godparents sit in the family pew, follow her up to the font in love and pride. Tilly – I hadn’t taken in how skinny the frame that has been carrying that lump about all the time I’ve known her – is elegant in hunting green, black button boots making her look like a Victorian governess. She gazes down at her daughter’s face, and her own breaks into a glow as though someone’s lit a candle. And she looks up and smiles at me, and I want, unaccountably, to weep. I want to turn my face to the sky and howl. But instead I smile back, and she interprets my tearfulness as pleasure.
Afterwards, the church party troops back to the castle for champagne from Edmund’s cellar, some of the stuff the three of us rescued together. It feels like a lifetime ago.
It’s a jolly party, and a young one, relatively speaking. A dozen of Tilly’s old school friends have come down from London, peacocks in thigh-high, jewel-coloured suits and hats that consist of little other than dyed feathers and sequins, breasts hoist and strapped to resemble pills in blister packs, diamond earrings and clouds of Chanel, husbands and kiddies and bursts of laughter. I had no idea the English could be so stylish.
The county get into the corner as usual. Fifteen leather-faced blondes braying sourly about the other residents of manor houses, thick-necked men swapping punchlines. I avoid them. It’s not hard. They, after all, are giving me a wide berth for fear that my instability might be catching.
Tilly comes over and stands with me by the window. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
‘I’m OK,’ I say. ‘It’s good to have a happy day here, eh?’
‘Are you still feeling sick?’
‘No. At least that seems to have passed.’
‘Well, that’s a blessing. I’m sorry I’ve not been down. I’ve not been much of a friend.’
I flash her a quick grin. ‘I’ll survive, babe,’ and change the subject. ‘Can I hold her?’
‘Of course.’
I get Lucy into my arms. She’s grown. Grown and developed, heavy and warm against my breasts.
‘I can’t believe she’s holding her head up already,’ I say.
‘I know. I’m already getting empty-nest syndrome and I’ve got another eighteen years to get ready in. I thought I’d start plugging in some extension flexes and leaving them out on the carpet for when she starts crawling.’
‘Good idea,’ I say. ‘Save her having to go too far. Maybe a few sharp objects scattered about the place would be good too. Are you glad you’ve got her?’
She beams. ‘I can’t tell you how much. It almost makes it worth having been married to Hugo.’
‘Steady.’
Tilly laughs. She laughs a lot more these days. ‘No. OK. But you know what? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I get up just to go and have a look at her. Not, you know, because I’m worried or anything. Just because …’ She looks over her shoulder to check that no one’s listening. ‘It’s really embarrassing. Just because I can’t believe that there’s anything in the world that beautiful. Don’t you just want to squash her?’
‘Till she leaks,’ I say.
She gives her daughter a sloppy kiss on her fuzzy pate and me a shy, conspiratorial look. ‘I don’t suppose you … you know …’
How can I possibly say? ‘Some time,’ I prevaricate. And the lie makes me suddenly sweaty.
‘Rufus would be a lovely father.’
‘Clucky,’ I accuse her.
Tilly giggles. ‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s just, when you’ve got one, suddenly you want to make everyone have one. It would be so nice, you know. If she really knew her cousins. Don’t you feel at all broody?’
Lucy kicks me in the tit, footy-style. It hurts like billyo. I shift her in my arms, pinion her legs against my stomach so she can’t do it again. ‘Oh, you know,’ I say evasively. ‘I don’t imagine Rufus is ready.’
‘God, they never are. Mel, it would be so much fun. Imagine.’
‘Jeez, you really are clucky.’
‘Just you wait. The biological time clock will get you one day.’
‘Naah. If I’ve got one, it’s made of quartz. Never ticks. Just occasionally goes wobbly if you spill a drink on it.’
A sudden flurry of boas and kitten heels, and three of the school friends descend at once. It’s like drowning in cherry pie. Each of the school friends, I’ve noticed, has a name ending in ‘a’: Christina, Louisa, Cassandra, Maria, Antonia, Arabella, Susanna, Lucinda, Tatiana, Venetia, Romina. Tilly must have seemed very exotic to them. Lucy is lifted from my arms and passed from cooing clutch to gurgling, manicured grip. ‘Darling, darling, darling,’ they go, ‘look at her little ears, I could just eat her right up do you ever come to London did you have a maternity nurse how are your bosoms are they down to your knees yet oh darling aren’t her little hands just the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?’
The sweaty feeling hasn’t worn off. My limbs feel oddly heavy. I feel – removed. It’s easy to slip away: they don’t really notice me. I head for a chair and take a break. How these people manage to stay standing about hour after hour beats me. It must be early training, like the Queen and the toilet.
I snatch a Marmite sandwich from a passing plate. Stuff it whole in my mouth, because, looking at Rufus over by the fireplace, I feel a strange emptiness inside. I mean, how could I do it? Look at them: so strange and so small and so stupid. I don’t seem able to look after my own self at the moment, let alone one of these little half-people.
As if on cue, one of them, a stubby blond boy, legs like sausages, belts past with his eyes shut, the way they do, runs smack into the wall. Sits down hard. Looks astonished, then offended, that the wall should have been there, that it should be so unyielding, that headbutting it should hurt, and opens his mouth to bawl.
And something weird happens. I’m on my feet and over by him in a second, and I’ve got my arms round him and my nose buried in the clean-feral smell of his hair, and something lurches in my stomach. Not sick, not scared: something primal. A sort of involuntary contraction, a sort of could-have-been-mine lurch. A sensation I have never felt before.
And then I’m freezing cold all over and trying to cover the fact that every one of my limbs has packed up and ceded its strength. Because I know, clear as day, what it means. What all my odd symptoms have been over the past couple of months. It means I can no longer discuss reproduction as an academic subject, think about it as a maybe-when or a maybe-if, no longer hope that one day the time might be right.
It’s already way too late for that.
Chapter Sixty-Five
A Deciding Moment
Now I know why the euphemism for pregnant is the same as the one for being in prison. Banged up. That’s me. Thoroughly up the duff. Bun in the oven. Knocked up. Awaiting a happy event. Enceinte. There’s a piss-covered diagnostic stick on the bedside table to prove it. And I have never felt so trapped.
God, I want a cigarette.
My cell rings. I send it to voicemail without looking to see who it is, switch it off. I can’t talk to anyone. I am a coward and I can’t. Not now. Not while my head is full of cotton wool and my nasal membranes are so swollen that anyone could tell I’ve been crying.
How could I not h
ave known? How could I not have worked it out? What am I, going ‘ooh, no, my period’ll come, it’s just the stress’? A fifteen-year-old in a trailer park?
Now I know it’s there, I can feel it, acutely, inside me, though it can’t be bigger than a walnut. I can feel my bloated uterus, my breasts like pincushions, the pressure on my bladder. I am as obviously pregnant as paunchy Pete the potman. And it was something I always thought I’d want, be glad about; I always thought I’d be one of those serene madonna-mothers smiling secretly and cupping my tummy, but instead here I am lying on a bed in some anonymous hotel room on the Oxford ring road and crying my eyes out.
Poor little blighter. What chance does it stand? Not just the awful, chaotic circumstances I’ll be bringing it into, but now I know what I know about the gene pool it’s come from, I can’t see a way forward. Murderous rednecks on one side, inbred snobs on the other and a slew of non-acceptance in the middle: it hasn’t got a snowball’s hope in hell.
I have to make a decision. I’ve been here two days, just lying on this bed, listening to the swoosh of traffic through the double glazing, watching the headlights track across the ceiling as I lie sleepless through the nights. I can’t stay here for ever.
I push myself up, go into the bathroom and wash my face. I don’t know why it is, but having a clean face is always the most effective first step to thinking straight. In the unforgiving striplight over the mirror, I look like a Victorian sideshow: eyes like gobstoppers, red on white on yellow, skin that’s swollen and hollowed at the same time, chips of peeling skin on the underside of my nose, lips cracked and sagging. I look forty. So much for the pregnancy glow. I get out my washbag and do what I can. Slather on face cream, foundation, powder, paint my eyelids back on and charcoal in some lashes where they look stubby and thin from rubbing. Rouge my cheeks and attempt a businesslike cupid’s bow on my cruddy lips. There. Now I look like someone’s resprayed a car crash.
I go back to the bedroom and face the cellphone. There are six messages. Rufus: ‘Mel, it’s me. Where are you? This is … I’m … where are you? Can you call me?’
Tilly: ‘Hi, darling. It’s Tilly. I’m just a bit … um, well, worried. We all are. You sort of vanished in the middle of things, and, well … Rufus is going spare. You don’t have to call me if you don’t want to, but can you call him, please? Or me. Either way. It doesn’t matter. Lots of love.’
Then Nessa: ‘Hey, babe. Friendly neighbourhood skivvy here. Tell you what, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle been going on since you went walkabout. Rufus looks like a stunned mullet. What’s up? Are you OK? Can you let someone know you haven’t carked it? I’ll be at home most of the time if I’m not down at the house.’
Then Rufus again: ‘Darling, I don’t understand. I don’t know what’s going on. Please, call me. I’ve got my mobile with me. You don’t need to call on the house phone. Just let me know you’re all right. It isn’t fair just to disappear. If I’ve done something, tell me what it is, but don’t just … disappear. God. I love you. Please, darling. Just call me.’
It’s like standing there while someone twists a knife in my heart. I move forward through the menu.
To my surprise, my mother. I haven’t heard from any of them since they left. Just the tone of her voice is enough to let me know that her feelings haven’t changed any.
‘Just to let you know, he’s been on the blower asking if you’ve turned up here, so we know all about it. I don’t want to say “I told you so”, but, hey. Yes, I do actually. I told you so. Just don’t think you can just come back here, is all. We’re done with it. You made your choices. I guess you can sell the car, eh?’
I press three to delete.
Finally, Rufus again: twenty minutes ago.
‘Um … you don’t want to speak to me. OK. I don’t understand why, but I understand that much. But you’ve been gone forty-eight hours now, and I’m frantic with worry. Please let me know you’re safe because … I don’t know … I guess I’m going to have to file a missing person’s report. Mel? Ring me, please? I love you.’
The sound of his voice kicks off another spasm of uncertainty. He sounds so worried, so hurt. I sit on the edge of the bed and weigh the phone in the palm of my hand. Thinking about it makes my head hurt. I find myself lying down again, hugging my knees. It’s been like this since I got here: collapse, self-loathing, brief bouts of sleep, the relentless dissection of my situation; and then a brief rally, some attempt at imposing order or control over my reeling senses. And then back again: curled up, foetally, as though in empathy with my baby.
I can’t go back. I can’t.
You can’t leave him. He loves you.
He betrayed me. He sided with them. It came down to it, and I needed him, and he didn’t believe me.
He doesn’t know. You have to give him a chance. You’re carrying his child.
I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t have a baby in that place, let them take it away from me. I can’t let my child grow up like them.
Rufus didn’t. Tilly didn’t. You didn’t. Nothing is determined ahead of time. You need to be strong.
But I’m not. I’m not strong. I am weak. I can’t fight them. I’m tired. I’m so tired.
You can. You have to. It’s not just about you. It’s him. It’s this child of his. It’s not just you any more, it’s the whole world: it’s the whole of life and the whole of the future. If you let them beat you now, they will beat you for ever. This is love you’re letting them kill. The one, the pure, the only thing you ever believed in.
A single tear slips out of the corner of my eye and lands on my wrist. And it’s that evidence of my own self-pity that finally decides me. I’m not a quitter. I’m not a leaver. I married for love and it’s love that will be destroyed if I don’t fight for it. If I don’t stand up and be counted, then everything – the future, his, mine, the baby’s – will be tainted with the brackish smack of my own frailty. I can’t let it happen. I must not let it happen.
Once again I force myself to sit up, drop the phone into the side pocket of my bag, and go to find some clothes.
Chapter Sixty-Six
I Kneel Before You
I see him as I come down the hill; he’s in the bottom deer paddock, hunkered down with his arms inside the engine of a tractor, a trailer carrying bales of hay parked at an oblique angle behind. I’m sure he hears my car, because he must be listening out for signs of my return, but he doesn’t raise his head to look. I park up in the courtyard and go round the side of the house. New scaffolding has been erected on the Georgian wing; I have to duck and clamber to get to the garden gate.
He doesn’t acknowledge my approach. Picks up a spanner and does something to the innards of the vehicle. I stand and look at him for a while before I speak: his sleeves rolled up, the slight suntan of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors, the faraway look of concentration.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘I think it’s something to do with the fuel feed.’
‘Do you think you can fix it?’
‘I don’t know, Melody. I really don’t know. But I’m trying.’ Then he says: ‘Have you come back?’
I shrug. ‘I think so. If you want me.’
‘More than anything,’ he says simply.
I kneel down beside him in the mud, feel the wet seep through the knees of my jeans.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll be better.’
He shakes his head. ‘Me too. I swear. Me too.’
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Don’t You Ever Knock?
Two days later. I’m lying in bed reading The Mysteries of Udolpho and Rufus is getting changed out of his dusty jeans into dinner clothes. ‘This is pretty sexy stuff,’ I say. ‘Kinky. Did you read the bit where the housekeeper swathes her in the rotting bridal veil? Do you think she realised how pussy-bumping that sounds?’
‘Probably,’ says Rufus. ‘They were a lot more sophisticated than we give them
credit for. You’ve got to remember, this lot bred Byron. Terrifically into rumpy-pumpy before the Victorians came along and spoiled things. Come on, darling. We’ve got to get downstairs. The gong went ten minutes ago.’
‘Do I have to go?’
‘Yes. You do.’
‘I’m not looking forward to this.’
‘What’s the worst that can happen?’
I look at him over Mrs Radcliffe and pull a face.
‘They’ll be so pleased,’ he says. ‘Honestly. I don’t understand why you’re so scared.’
I put the book, face down and open, on the bedcover. ‘One of two things is going to happen here,’ I say. ‘Either your mum is going to throw a wobbly, or I’m going to be turned overnight from sex diva into milch cow, and I don’t relish the prospect of either much.’
Mary hasn’t spoken to me since I came back. So there’s a surprise.
Rufus comes over to the bed and puts a hand on my tummy. God, it’s freaky the way everyone wants to touch your stomach the minute they know you’re pregnant. ‘You’ll always be a sex diva to me,’ he says.
‘Give it time. I’m going to be a sex heffalump before you know it.’
‘You’re going to get such a great big arse. I can’t wait.’
I tousle his hair and he kisses the side of my throat. And then he gets up and goes over to sit on the chair and put on his shoes. Not fair.
‘I’ll tell you,’ I say, pulling back the bedcovers, ‘it’s horny stuff. Which one should I read next?’
‘Oh, The Monk, I should think. Seriously dirty. Makes Dracula look like Little Women. There’s a scene in there … well, I’ll let you find out for yourself. Put me off my dinner, I’ll tell you.’
‘That wouldn’t be difficult.’
‘You said you wouldn’t be sarky any more.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right. Come on, darling. Get a move on.’
But the book and the throat-kissing have got to me. And Rufus. He always gets to me, one way or another. ‘What do you say we give dinner a miss?’
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