My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  Sometimes, after Sunday lunches, Ruth would wander unobserved into her father-in-law’s study and deliberately nudge the spine of a book or two deeper into the shelf, out of alignment. The order of things on his desk – the ivory letter-opener, the magnifying glass, the little papier-mâché box containing postage stamps, the cut-glass inkwell, with its polished silver lid, the blotting paper economically retained until every inch of its surface was stained – somehow offended her. Once, she had taken the torch – always kept in its appointed place on the hall table for emergencies – and dropped it into a dusty Wellington boot. The sheer childishness of her actions made giggles ferment inside her, and she had to take a turn around the garden just to stop herself from laughing stupidly.

  It had been an uncomfortable pregnancy and it was an uncomfortable birth. The baby – a girl – was the wrong way round and wouldn’t come out of her own accord. Ruth had had to be cut and there had been urgent tugging, forceps, and doors flapping open and then shut as nurses and then a doctor rushed in and out. It had hurt awfully. By the time the baby appeared, Ruth was exhausted. The baby wasn’t like Isobel, pink and adorably round. She was skinny, with little jutting elbows and a cross face and dark hair like wet feathers. When, after being stitched, Ruth at last held her and looked down into her face, the baby averted her gaze, her eyes roving away. The thought that she was searching for another, better, mother flitted into Ruth’s mind.

  Ruth was worried that Harry would have liked a son, but he could not have been more delighted with his second daughter. The baby looked even scrawnier with his big hands around her little body, but he seemed to think she was perfect.

  ‘Miranda do you think? Are you a Miranda? Or an Alice? Or a Felicity?’ He beamed at the infant.

  All the names she had ever liked evaporated from Ruth’s memory. ‘Do you think it would be too silly to call her Harriet?’ she said, on a whim. A name with Harry in it had to be all right.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t know. We might get confused, rather, when people call her. Think they meant me.’

  ‘I’d be able to tell the difference. So would you.’

  They both looked at the baby, but she betrayed no sign that the name was either right or wrong.

  ‘Emily!’ said Harry emphatically. ‘That’s her name, don’t you think, darling?’

  Ruth smiled thinly. She was too tired to care.

  Back in Putney the days dragged. Isobel was flushed and wilful, prone to outbursts of loud crying when thwarted in the least thing. Ruth found that she was less confident with Emily, despite having been through new motherhood before: the baby didn’t cry or fret, but she seemed always to be awake, looking around her. Ruth fed her, put her over one shoulder and patted her back to rid her of wind, then changed her nappy, the pin clenched between her teeth as if she was dressmaking. Then she couldn’t think what to do with her. With Isobel, she had laid her on her side in her crib, the wide satin border of the blanket tucked neatly under her chin, and the baby had simply slept. Ruth had loved the smell of warmth and baby powder and clean wool which hung in the room. But Emily didn’t want to sleep. And the child was too small to read to, or for her sister to play with.

  After lunch, most days, Ruth took a rug out into the garden and installed herself upon it with a book, which she read fitfully, without concentration. She did not like this garden very much. It felt too hemmed in, too like the gardens on either side. Isobel brought her doll outside, or played in the sandbox Harry had made for her, chatting bossily to herself. Emily kicked her twig-like legs and goggled. Was she cold? Ruth always worried that she might be, being so skinny. Gradually the baby’s gaze became more focused: she inspected her hands wondrously, as if they were independent, miraculously floating things. She stared at the buddleia and the butterflies which alighted on it.

  Sometimes Ruth sang songs:

  ‘The sun has got his hat on

  Hip-hip-hip-hooray!

  The sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out today!

  Now we’ll all be happy …’

  Her voice sounded thin.

  ‘Silly Mummy!’ Isobel said. ‘The sun isn’t wearing his hat!’My Former Heart

  ‘How do you know?’ said Ruth.

  ‘Because he hasn’t got a hat. It’s my sunhat, remember? I’ve got it on, not him. If he wore a hat I wouldn’t need to.’ And she pointed upwards, squinting pinkly at the light.

  Ruth knew she should be amused. Harry loved to hear such quaint snippets when he came home, but instead she felt wretched suddenly. Here she was, doing her best to entertain the girls, singing, bringing them outside into the dappled sunlight of her garden, just as she was supposed to, reading Kate Greenaway and interminable Beatrix Potter – had those stories always been so long? – giving them rosehip syrup and fingers of bread and butter at intervals; yet she failed to be part of the scene she was creating. She felt strangely uninvolved. It was as if she were acting. Playing mummy.

  But without Harry there was no audience to appreciate her performance. Every day Ruth longed for him to get home. She got through the mornings, when her charwoman, Mrs Lane, came in (a new woman, quieter, not their old chatterbox from Pimlico), then gave the children their lunch. But from about two o’clock she felt almost frantic, restless and alone. What was funny about children was that they weren’t company. She often felt lonely when she was with them, but without any of the advantages of solitude: she couldn’t sit at the piano for as long as she liked, nor experience the intense pleasure she had sometimes enjoyed when out of doors by herself. You couldn’t talk to little children, yet they prevented you from really talking to anyone else, and whenever she had a visitor, one or other of the girls somehow made conversation impossible. Worse, you couldn’t be sure that any interval in their timetable of demand would last long enough to play through a piece of music without being interrupted. Every afternoon after their time outside, while the girls had their lie-down, she practised at her piano. She progressed through scales, to scales in broken octaves, chords to broken chords, to arpeggios. She worked on her third and fourth fingers and especially on keeping her thumbs light, making her arms as free as she could without jerking her elbows. Only then was she ready to play a piece in full. Concentrating at the piano, she forgot time and was always dismayed when one or other of her girls – generally it was Emily – disturbed her. She felt as if she had only just sat down, when in reality an hour or more had passed. But if she made no attempt to practise and kept an ear out for them, the girls slept for hours, or cooed contentedly in the nursery. She would hear Isobel talking to Emily in the special instructive voice she reserved for her sister.

  Harry’s presence in the house made sense of things, as if Ruth and the girls were a picture that had been knocked in passing and was hanging slightly crooked: his arrival among them straightened the frame. He took the children in his arms, on his knees; he tickled and laughed. After their bath – Ruth gave it to them, while he looked at the paper or stepped into the garden with a drink – he often read to the girls, enjoying their innocent and familiar smells of soap, damp hair and hot-ironed Viyella, enjoying Isobel’s questions and baby Emily’s dancing limbs. Once the children were in bed, Harry poured gin and bitter lemon for himself and Ruth, while she got their supper ready, often trying new recipes. She attempted coq au vin, and, once, beef stew with olives (they agreed neither of them really cared for olives), and fish cakes made with tinned salmon. They drank water with their food, unless they were having people to dinner, when bottles of red wine would be uncorked. After eating they each had a glass of whisky, which made Ruth feel thrillingly unfeminine, as if she were a businessman in a panelled boardroom and not a housewife in Putney at all. Sometimes they listened to gramophone records while they drank, or played cards; they told each other stories about their days.

  Once a week or so they went up to the West End to the theatre or a concert, or sometimes to the cinema. Mrs Lane’s teenage daughter, Dawn, babysat. Ruth liked the Fe
stival Hall, but Harry thought it was hideous, like a bunker. He couldn’t get on with modern architecture. Ruth loved their evenings out together, when they held hands in the prickly velvet darkness, like a courting couple again. But what she loved best was to be in bed. Once she had recovered from giving birth, she found a new depth of pleasure in her body, an urgency, as if her husband was a life raft and she was floundering in cold water. Sometimes she could barely wait until dinner was over to reach for him. It was only when they made love that she felt in full occupation of her body. The baby, who otherwise slept soundly through the nights in her own room, often chose the final moments of her parents’ love-making to startle awake and cry loudly. Harry was able to climax, impervious to the sound of his daughter’s cries, but Ruth could not, and she began to feel slightly persecuted by the child. It was as though the baby possessed a sixth sense which alerted her to sabotage her mother’s pleasure, even through her sleep.

  Little Isobel struggled to pronounce her sister’s name, but persistently called her Lemily, which gradually got contracted to its first syllable: Lem. Iris made a great fuss of the child, rather to Ruth’s irritation; she had not minded her mother being so little interested in Isobel, because she expected no more from her. Babies were not Iris’s forte, as she admitted herself. But now she liked one, which only threw into sharp relief the fact that she had apparently not much cared for the one before. Ruth smarted with vicarious indignation on Isobel’s part, although Isobel did not seem to notice, or care. She preferred her father’s mother, whom she saw every week. Iris meant only one thing to her elder granddaughter, for where Iris was there was her uncle Jamie, her idol.

  Harry’s mother and brothers and their wives (all the Longden sons were now married, only Verity remained unwed) displayed no preference for one child or another, yet their even-handedness irked Ruth almost more than her own mother’s favouritism. Her sisters-in-law bored Ruth, but they fitted in perfectly at the family house in Richmond: they were docile and undemanding. They talked about casseroles and the troubles they had with their charwomen (‘She will forget to change the flower water, no matter how often I say. And the cushions: she puts them at the most dreadful angles, with the corners pointing up. I’m forever having to put them straight again.’). They listened when the men spoke, and laughed becomingly. Ruth longed for something to crumple the smooth surface of the collective Longden temperament. Even Verity had begun to get on her nerves. The air in the Longden household did not seem to circulate adequately; there was such a sense of stuffiness and inertia. After lunch they just sat. The evenings at home after their days with the Longdens were the only ones on which Ruth did not feel like making love with her husband. It was as if proximity to his family made their dullness and sanctimony rub off on him, clinging to him like the smell of old cooking fat.

  Winter had come, Lem was almost ten months old when, one Sunday lunch at her in-laws, Ruth was overcome with sickness. She had taken a mouthful of roast chicken, scraping a little bread sauce onto her fork, when suddenly the sauce decoalesced in her mouth. It tasted not like sauce at all, but horribly like its constituents: stale, soggy bread, oniony milk, oily, pungent clove. Covering her mouth with a hand, she rushed from the table to the downstairs loo, a room she had barely entered before, since it was informally used only by the men of the house. There were old cartoons from Punch, along with photographs, dating from their school and university days, of Harry and his brothers in various sporting teams. There was hard loo paper folded in a little basket and a cracked piece of coal-tar soap on the basin.

  Having vomited, Ruth steadied herself with one hand on the wall. She registered the smell of the soap, stale though it was: like distant creosote, as if someone a few doors down were painting their garden fence. It amazed her that she was able to formulate such thoughts at the same time as feeling such a sense of panic that she wondered if she might actually keel over. No. She couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. She was still feeding the baby; she hadn’t missed a period.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said to herself. ‘I can’t.’

  But why not? Another voice, oppositional, launched itself. She was happily married, a young mother already: one more wouldn’t hurt. Harry wanted a big family, she knew that. It might be a boy. A brother for the girls. A son for Harry. A boy like Harry, with Harry’s adorable face and pale lashes. These thoughts flitted into her head. Nevertheless she felt, overwhelmingly, that this was something she simply could not do. It was not possible. It might be possible for someone else, like translating from the Chinese, or riding in the Grand National. But it wasn’t something Ruth could do. It was as if she was in mutiny.

  Harry mustn’t know. That was the first thing. She must regain her composure and go back to the table and finish her lunch and say nothing. She only had to get through lunch, and then the afternoon, and then the evening. The next day would be Monday and she would be able to think about it then, uninterrupted. She looked in the mirror above the basin and silently told her pale reflection: It’s all right. You’re all right. She splashed her face with cold water and rinsed out her mouth.

  On Monday she asked Mrs Lane if she could stay on to see to the children while she went into town. Ruth could not approach the doctor she’d seen for her pregnancies with the girls: he was a colleague of Verity’s and might disapprove, or worse, tell. She didn’t know who she could ask, until she thought of one of the other lodgers who had lived in the same digs in South Kensington. Sasha, her name was: she’d been a student at the College of Art. She had been seeing one of the teachers there, all rather hush-hush, and then it had stopped, abruptly. Sasha had spent some days in her room. When Ruth saw her in the corridor she looked tear-stained in a too-big dressing gown, diminished. There had been drips of blood on the bathroom lino. Ruth had brought her some oranges and cigarettes and sat on her bed among the peels and the spilling ashtray, not mentioning it. Ruth had a telephone number for her, in Maida Vale.

  Sasha was surprised to hear from her, but she was friendly and responded at once. They arranged to meet that afternoon for tea. Sasha wore smudged black eyeliner and big, rather African-looking jewellery, and was taller than Ruth had remembered her. She worked as a studio assistant for a rather famous sculptor three days a week, still painted herself, had had pictures in some group exhibitions. She hadn’t married yet. Ruth did not dissemble and Sasha gave her the name of a Mr Burnside in Lower Cavendish Street. Back in Putney she telephoned to make an appointment. He could see her on Wednesday.

  His waiting room was awfully grand, with a white marble fireplace covered in carved grapes. Yes, she was pregnant; yes, he could help. She would need to see a psychiatrist, and there was a colleague whom he could recommend. If – at the word ‘if’ Mr Burnside arched his eyebrows, indicating that this ‘if’ was a mere formality – the psychiatrist found adequate mental grounds, he would refer her back to himself. Then they would proceed. That was how it worked. She would need to spend a night in the clinic, of course. Was there someone who could take her home and keep an eye on her for a few days afterwards? It was his experience that such things were better dealt with, with the minimum of delay. This being the case, he would suggest that she come in on the following Tuesday morning. If she would step into the waiting room he would telephone the psychiatrist and see whether he might be able to fit her in this afternoon.

  Ruth walked to Marylebone High Street and realised she was hungry. She stepped into Café Sagne, where she ordered coffee and asked for the plainest pastry they had, a request which seemed to annoy the waitress. She thought over what Mr Burnside had said. In her hand was a piece of crisp writing paper, with the address of Mr Burnside’s rooms in curling embossed letters at the top. He had written out the name and Devonshire Place address of the psychiatrist, as well as a time: two o’clock. Ruth had noticed that Mr Burnside handled his rather fat fountain pen with a certain flourish; when he glanced down at his own handwriting it was with a hint of unmistakable self-regard.

  Ruth
drank her coffee, ignoring the saliva which rose against the roof of her mouth in protest. It wasn’t like making a decision. There was to be no weighing up of the pros and cons of things and certainly no discussion; no advice or reassurance to be sought. It was like getting rid of a splinter: something which had to be done as a matter of course, with no fuss. A hitch. Ruth realised that she had become something mechanical, without feeling. Once set in motion she had to go on, however stiltedly, like a clockwork figure grinding again and again against a skirting board. Had someone asked her why she must proceed, she would have had no ready answer. She did not know why really she could not face a third child, a third pregnancy, only that it was something she simply could not undertake.

  She trudged through the day. The psychiatrist asked her questions which she answered automatically, as if she had already learned the answers off pat. He told her he would let Mr Burnside know that a third child would place an intolerable strain on her nervous system. Once she had put on her coat and stood up to leave he asked her, ‘Is your husband well-off?’

  ‘I suppose so. Adequately. I mean, we seem to manage,’ Ruth said, taken aback. Money was not something she generally thought much about.

  ‘I only ask because it seems to me that you would benefit from some extra help with the children. If you could find a girl to come in, even if it wasn’t every day? That would give you some time to yourself. You could play your piano. I think you’re overtired.’

  Ruth felt a rush of gratitude and relief. Tears stung her eyes. At last someone understood. Overtired. Of course that was it. She wasn’t a hopeless mother or a wicked woman or a terrible wife. She wasn’t an automaton, unfamiliar to herself. She was just overtired.