by Meg Mason
I went back over to Ingrid, who was shoving things under the pram. She said, ‘I guess you won’t be coming to playgrounds with me any more now you’re on the register,’ but she was smiling. She kicked the brake off. ‘Gosh they were sweet though.’
The sun was sinking on the other side of the slag heap as we drove past it again on the way home. Ingrid, gazing out the window, said, ‘Boys, no matter what befalls us as a family, I will never let your father move us to Merthyr Tydfil.’
*
Later, her children in bed, my sister and I sat on the sofa drinking canned gin and tonic and watching the fire, which had been dying since the second we lit it.
I said, ‘When you have a baby, do you automatically turn into someone who can cope with seeing a woman with bags on her feet scream at a child who isn’t hers? You’re suddenly just strong enough to be in a world where that happens?’
Ingrid swallowed and said no. ‘It makes it worse because as soon as you’re a mother, you realise every child was a baby five seconds ago, and how could anyone shout at a baby? But then, you shout at your own and if you can do that, you must be a terrible person. Before you had kids, you were allowed to think you were a good person so then you secretly resent them for making you realise you’re actually a monster.’
‘I already know I’m a monster.’ I wanted her to tell me I wasn’t.
She turned on the television. ‘I guess you’ve saved yourself a job then.’
It was a movie we had both seen before with an actress who was, in the present scene, trying to force all her shopping bags into the back of a yellow cab. In real life, she had just leapt off a roof. During the advertisements, Ingrid said the thing everybody says. She couldn’t understand how anyone could feel so bad they’d want to do that. I was scratching something off my jeans, not really listening, and said without thinking that I obviously could.
‘No but like, not that bad, that you’d genuinely want to die.’
I laughed, then glanced up to see why she had suddenly turned off the television. Ingrid was just looking at me.
‘What?’
‘When you’re depressed, you don’t genuinely want to die. When have you ever felt like that?’
I asked her if she was being serious. ‘Every time, I feel like that.’
Ingrid said, ‘Martha! You do not!’
I said okay.
‘You can’t just say okay. Okay what? Okay you don’t feel like that?’
‘No – okay you don’t have to believe me.’
She pushed all the cushions that were between us onto the floor and made me shift my legs so she could sit right next to me. She said if that was true, we had to talk about it. I said we didn’t.
‘But I want to understand what it’s like for you. Feeling like that.’
I tried to. For the first time, I told her about the night on the balcony at Goldhawk Road. The way I felt when I was standing out there, staring down at the dark garden, then stopped because she looked so upset. Her eyes were enormous and glassy.
I said it’s not something you can really explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
She cried, a single, aching sob, then said sorry and tried to smile. ‘I suppose it’s the ultimate had-to-be-there.’
For a while we sat like that, my sister holding my wrist, until I said she needed to go to bed.
*
I heard her get up in the night and went into her room. She was sitting up in bed feeding the baby, beatific in the half-light of a lamp she had dimmed with a towel that was still damp from the leisure centre floor.
She said, ‘Come and keep me awake.’ I got into bed next to her. ‘Tell me something funny.’
I told her about the time when we were teenagers, that our house – for no reason and as if by some force outside the four of us – began to fill with African tribal art, masks, juju hats, in such quantity that the downstairs of Goldhawk Road started to look like the gift shop at Nairobi international airport. I told her the only piece I could remember exactly was a bronze fertility sculpture that was in the hallway for a while, directly inside the front door, and only because its phallus was so pronounced that, as she said at the time, when it inadvertently got turned ninety degrees it was like a fucking boom gate.
Ingrid said she remembered it as well. ‘I started hanging my PE bag on it.’
Neither of us knew when and how it disappeared. Just that, one day it was all gone. The baby hiccoughed. My sister laughed.
I said, ‘What’s the best thing about it?’
Without taking her eyes off her son, Ingrid said, ‘This. All of it. I mean, it’s shit, but all of it. Especially,’ she yawned, ‘the time between finding out you are pregnant and telling anyone, including your husband. Even if it’s just a week or one minute in my case. No one talks about that part.’
She went on to describe a sense of privacy so singular and ecstatic that, as desperate as she felt to tell someone, it was still painful to give up. She said, ‘You feel the most intense inner superiority because everyone is oblivious to the fact you have gold inside you. For however long, you get to walk around knowing you’re better than everyone else.’ She yawned again and handed me the baby while she put her top back on. ‘Did you know that’s why the Mona Lisa is smiling like that? As in, so smugly. Because she’d just done a test or whatever in the studio loo and got the two lines right before she sat down and he’s studying her for ten hours a day and the whole time she’s like, he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant.’
I asked her how they knew that but she said she couldn’t remember, something to do with a shadow he put on her neck, to do with some gland that only sticks out when you’re pregnant, and I should just Google it later.
Cross-legged then, Ingrid spread a muslin square out in front of her and took the baby back, laid him down and wrapped him in a tight swaddle. She didn’t pick him up, instead, gazed down at him and smoothed out a fold in the fabric, then said, ‘Sometimes, I wish you did want children. I just think it would have been fun, having babies at the same time.’
I said maybe I would have but I hated leisure centres and they seemed mandatory to the task.
Ingrid picked the baby up and held him out. ‘Can you put him back in the thing?’
I got up and carried him against my shoulder. I felt like she was watching me as I set him down on the little mattress and slid my hands out from underneath him.
She said, Martha? ‘I hope it’s not because you really think you’re a monster.’
I put a blanket over him, tucked both sides and asked my sister not to talk about it any more.
*
In the morning I got up and made the older boys breakfast so that she could keep sleeping. The eldest one asked me to make him boiled eggs.
The middle one said, I don’t want boiled eggs and started crying. He said he wanted a pancake.
I told him they could have different things.
‘No we can’t.’
I asked him why not.
He said because this isn’t a restaurant.
While he was waiting for his pancake, he recounted a dream he had had when he was much younger, about a bad man who was trying to drink him. He said he didn’t find it scary any more. Only sometimes, when he remembered it.
27
NEAR THE STEPS of St Mark’s Basilica, I threw up into a cigarette bin. Patrick and I were in Venice for our fifth wedding anniversary. For the previous two weeks, he’d kept asking me if I wanted to cancel because I was obviously sick. I said, ‘Refreshingly of body not of mind though, so it’s fine.’
I was desperate to cancel. But he had bought a Lonely Planet. He had been reading it in bed every night and as ill and scared as I was, I couldn’t bear to disappoint someone whose desires were so modest they could be circled in pencil.
Patrick found us somewhere to sit down. He said I should go to the doctor again as soon as we got back to Oxford in case it wasn’t just a virus. I said it was and, since it hadn’t made m
e vomit before, clearly that was a separate, psychosomatic reaction to the fact that we looked so much like tourists because of his backpack.
I was pregnant. I had known for a fortnight and hadn’t told him. The doctor who had confirmed it said no idea to the question of how it had happened with the implant still in my arm. ‘Nothing’s foolproof. Anyway, five weeks, by my maths.’
Patrick stood up and said, ‘Let’s go back to the hotel. You can go to bed and I’ll change our flights.’
I let him pull me up. ‘But you wanted to see that bridge. The Ponte de whatever it is.’
He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll come back.’
The walk to the hotel led us to it anyway. Patrick got out his guidebook and read from a page that had the corner turned down. ‘Why is the Bridge of Sighs so named?’ He said it was funny that I should ask. ‘In the seventeenth century …’
Listening to him read I felt like I was being constricted by sadness. Not because et cetera, et cetera, according to lore, criminals being led to the prison on the other side would sigh at their final view of Venice through the windows of the bridge which are typically baroque in style. Just because of the way Patrick was frowning at the page, the way he looked up intermittently to check if I was listening, the way he said wow, once he’d finished. ‘That’s quite depressing.’ We flew home the next day.
*
I told him at the allotment. Every day that I’d known, before Venice, in Venice, the week that had passed since, I had set out to tell him but in whatever moment, I found a different reason to defer. He was tired, he was holding his phone, he was wearing a jumper that I did not like. He was too content in what he was doing. That day, a Sunday, I woke up and read the note he had left me. I got dressed and went to find him.
He was sitting on the fallen log, holding something. I did not think I could do it, once I was close enough to see what it was. I could not rupture his existence, reveal my deceit and bifurcate Patrick’s future while he was holding a Thermos.
There was only ever one reason. Once I told him, it would be real and I would have to fix it. There wasn’t any time left. I just said it.
In the period of forestalling, I thought I had imagined every reaction Patrick might have, but it was worse than any I could invent myself – my husband asking me how far along I was. It was a phrase too specific to an experience we had not had, or one we were not allowed to use in our version of it.
I said, ‘Eight weeks.’
He didn’t ask me how long I had known. It was too obvious. He said, ‘I don’t know how I didn’t guess’ as if it was his fault and then, sitting forward, his elbows on his knees, looking at the ground, he said, ‘We’re not deciding what to do though.’
‘No, I’m just telling you.’
‘So there’s not an immediate rush.’
‘No. But I’m not going to wait for no reason.’
He said okay. ‘That makes sense.’
I tipped the tea out and handed him back the cup. ‘I’m going to go. I’ll see you at home.’
‘Martha?’
‘What?’
‘Could I have a few days?’
I told him I hadn’t booked it yet. There would be that much time anyway.
*
Patrick did not mention it when he got home or in the days that followed but he moved differently around the house. He came home early. He wouldn’t let me do anything. He was always there in the morning but whenever I woke up in the night, he was somewhere else. I knew it was the only thing he was thinking about.
Sunday, again, he came into the bathroom while I was in the bath and sat on the end. He said, ‘So, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I’ve just been thinking, you definitely don’t want to keep it?’
I said no.
‘You don’t feel like, if we did – because I honestly think you’d be –’
‘Please don’t. Patrick.’
‘Okay. It’s just, I don’t want it to be something that later we wish we’d thought about.’
I pushed the water with my foot. ‘Patrick!’
‘Alright. Sorry.’ He got up and threw a towel over the wet floor. ‘I’ll get you the referral.’ His shirt, the leg of his jeans, were soaking.
As he was walking out of the bathroom, I said, ‘It shouldn’t have happened.’ I told him, it was never a thing. But he didn’t turn around, just said okay, yep.
I slid down, under the water, as soon as he had closed the door.
*
It was a miscarriage anyway.
It started the morning of the appointment, while I was pushing my bike along a steep bit of the towpath. I knew what it was and kept walking. At home, I called Patrick at work and waited in the bathroom until it was over. It had been so cold outside that I was still wearing my coat when he came in.
He drove me to the hospital and apologised on the way home, hours later, for not being able to think of the right thing to say. I said it was fine, I didn’t want to talk about it then anyway.
I did not tell anyone what had happened and, afterwards, only cried if Patrick was out – as soon as he left, from the effort of containing it. In short, intense bursts at the recollection of what I had been about to do. For minutes, as I moved around the house, weeping in gratitude that she had let go of me first.
*
Much later – too much later – when Patrick and I talked about what had happened, I said, ‘to her,’ he asked me how I knew it was a girl.
I said I just did.
‘What would you have called her?’
Flora.
I said, ‘I don’t know.’
*
There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you cannot apologise for them. Instead, watching television on the sofa, eating the dinner he made while you showered after the hospital, you say, Patrick?
Yes.
I like this sauce.
*
We said the Cotswolds, a walk or a pub or something, just to get out of Oxford. We said, it will be good. We said, we’ll be there in half an hour. Let’s just go.
It was ten miles from the Executive Home to the turn off. Patrick did not take it. It had been wordlessly established by then that neither of us wanted to stop, only drive and keep going until there was so much distance behind us. I looked out my window at the smattering of houses built with their backs to the road. They thickened into the village, thinned again. Fields to the right. We kept to the A road. It narrowed, became woods on both sides. It slowed through other villages, doglegged, widened and sped up, bypassed a town. Its industrial outskirts became a long section of countryside. Services. Signs for the M6. It said Birmingham, next exit. It stopped being beautiful. On the other side, it was beautiful again. Patrick said how are you going? Good. I’m not hungry, are you? Not really. Do you want music? Do you? Not really.
We passed a sign that said Manchester 40 and we looked at each other and smiled, silently, bulging eyes, like two people in a crowd acknowledging a secret between themselves. Six lanes, a density of cars, drivers on either side became familiar from the slowing and stopping and starting again. They smoked, tapped the wheel. Their passengers looked at their phone, ate and drank and put their feet on the dashboard.
Then, we were past Manchester. Countryside but plain, dotted with factories. Silos. At intervals along the road, a suburban house without a suburb.
I said, ‘How long have we been going for?’
Patrick looked at the time. ‘We left at nine so, six hours. Five and a half?’
Nothing for a long time except the vague sense of the road curving, and starting to climb. He put the window down, maybe salt in the air but no sight of the ocean. Then winding sharply upwards, until You Are Now Entering an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
It was late in the afternoon. Patrick said I might need to stop for a bit soon. In a mile, there was a sign that said Access with a symbol of a bridge and after the next curve in the road, an unpaved layby.
Th
e air was clear and sharp. We stretched and twisted our backs, the same way, in unison. Patrick said one sec, got our jackets, then locked the car. I took his hand and we walked the path that cut through dense wood to a river. It was swift moving but where it curved, in front of us, a pool had formed. It was deep and still and dark green and from the bank we were standing on, a sheer drop of – Patrick said – ‘nine feet, maybe ten’. We looked down into it.
He said okay but I’ll go first.
We took our clothes off and hung them over a branch. Patrick said, ‘I don’t see why you get the added warmth of a bra.’ I took it off and both of us lingered for another minute on the edge, already shivering.
He said, ‘Aim for the middle’ and leapt out. The noise of him hitting the water was like a crack. I followed while he was still below the surface. The water was so cold that, at the instant of entry, it could not be deciphered beyond shock and pressure, then a sharp pain in the heart muscle, lungs like heavy stones, then burning skin. I opened my eyes, a blur of green and swirling silt. I thought, move your arms but they were rigid, above my head. I felt suspended. Then everything was Patrick’s grip on my forearm, and the rush of being tugged upwards and the great pull of air. And then we were face to face, speechless, breathing too hard. He still had my arm and swept me forwards to the bank.
I was below the surface for only a second but I thought I was already drowning. I did not think I could swim back but I was only ever feet away from the edge. It was just the pain of the water. And then Patrick was helping me back up the bank, and I was standing, wrapped in my jacket, water running down my bare legs, and it had only been a minute.
