‘Her? A girl? They can tell? A girl?’ It’s as though a window has been thrown open somewhere in Patricia’s world: light. The hypothetical baby has become a plump, pink granddaughter, creases where her wrists should be, seashell toes and pale, soft hair.
Richenda smiles. ‘It’s amazing what they can tell. Yes, she’s a girl.’
And from her handbag she pulls a photocopied sheet and hands it to Patricia, who realizes she is looking at the scan of her granddaughter. Bones. Lungs. Heart. Fingers. Michael’s nose. Definitely Michael’s nose.
If Patricia had known the phrase ‘I’m in’ she’d have said it, now. Instead she wipes an eye and says, ‘Of course, of course I will be a part of this little one’s life. My granddaughter. Michael’s baby.’
Richenda is smiling, wiping a tear too, and Patricia, fearing a slide into something more than she can manage, adds abruptly, ‘Even though I’m not too keen on the way she came about.’
‘Well, me neither,’ Richenda says, then, swiftly, taking a different road, ‘Kate is talking about calling her Kayla.’
‘Kayla?’ Patricia repeats. ‘Is that even a name?’
‘Well, quite,’ says Richenda. And suddenly the two women are laughing, quietly, cautiously, although Patricia stops when she thinks about the conversation that she’s going to need to have with Elizabeth, and Richenda stops as she thinks about Kate, already up when her mother came downstairs, reading websites about cystic fibrosis and making note after note.
‘I can’t believe she isn’t perfect,’ Kate had said, ‘but I suppose she will be perfect to me, won’t she?’
Rufus does want to be a better man. He just doesn’t want it enough, yet, to pass up the opportunity that life has thrown him for a little bit of revenge.
As he walks up the road, he remembers how he felt when he was last making this journey. How carefully he’d chosen the flowers, how much time he’d spent standing in the florist’s while the bouquet was made up, that insufferable woman making snide remarks about how much Mrs Micklethwaite would like these and how he must have done something very naughty indeed to merit such a gesture. In memory he smells the roses again, soft and sweet. In reality his shoulders knot and his hands clench. His thumb finds a hangnail on his little finger and works it back and forth until it hurts.
When he arrives, it’s like history repeating itself. The sister is in the garden, smoking. She isn’t wearing the red boots. She’s barefoot, and her toenails are a deep ocean turquoise. She looks at Rufus with the same disdain. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s you. No flowers today?’
‘No. Is your sister here?’
‘She’s asleep,’ Mel says, ‘you’ll have to make do with me, I’m afraid.’ Rufus recognizes that he’s being played with, teased, and his sense of injustice grows.
‘Wake her up.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Rufus,’ Mel says, as though she had any right to say such a thing. She gets up and starts to move back towards the house. He takes her by the upper arm, and she looks at him properly, shocked, still a little amused, ‘That’s still ridiculous.’
He drops his hand. ‘I need to talk to your sister.’
‘I’m not going to wake her. Anyway, you’re not exactly on the guest list around here.’
‘Very well,’ Rufus says, ‘perhaps you’ll give her a message for me.’
‘Of course.’
‘Please tell her from me that I now know that her late husband impregnated my daughter while, presumably, lying to her about the relationship. Please tell her that I regret every bit of credit and appreciation that I have given to that man. The thought of him being lauded as a hero makes me ill.’
Mel is transfixed by the warp of his mouth as he speaks.
‘I probably won’t give her that message, actually,’ she says, ‘and you might like to consider that your daughter has passed the age of consent. All of the hero stuff was posthumous so I’m not sure that Michael got the chance to sign it off, and I’m not sure he would have liked it much. He was a good guy. Good enough to get into a freezing cold lake and pull your daughter out, and if we’re going to start believing every rumour that Throckton can think up, well, heaven help us all.’
In her agitation Mel has lit up again – although it doesn’t read to Rufus as agitation, more like provocation, the pause mid-sentence for the inhale a further insult – and now she’s stuck outside, not wanting to put out her cigarette and show that she’s rattled, banned from smoking indoors.
‘Ah, then you’re behind the curve,’ Rufus says, and the small, fat, bullied boy inside him is ecstatic, crowing at having a piece of news that others don’t, loving being the centre of everything. The man, he knows, worried and afraid for his daughter, is waiting to take over, but not yet. ‘That’s not what his mother thinks.’
‘Rufus, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Patricia talks a lot of crap, though, so if she’s the source of your information, you might want to be careful.’
This is Rufus’s moment, and he savours it. ‘Michael’s mother came to warn us that cystic fibrosis runs in the family, and Kate has taken her warning very seriously. In fact, Kate has told us that Michael is definitely the father of her baby. She has photographs of the two of them together. You might want to tell Elizabeth that, too.’
Mike,
I didn’t know whether I’d like being back at work, but I do. There’s nothing of it that’s very spectacular, but there’s always something to do, and that’s what I like, I think: there’s always someone who wants me to do something, right then, and they ask, and I do it. I don’t have to decide things.
I don’t look at a great long day and think, well, if I put off having a shower until 10.30am, then by the time I dry my hair that’s most of the morning gone. I look at my watch and think, how can it be 3.30 already? And that has to be better, doesn’t it? Today I booked the handyman to come and fix a tap, and I organized some flowers to go in the honeymoon suite on Saturday, and I arranged a refund for someone who’d been charged twice. I gave directions to the town square three separate times to three different sets of people, and I watched a baby while a woman nipped back to her room for something she’d forgotten. The baby didn’t do much but I watched her all the same. I thought of – well. You know.
When I came home no one was here. Not even Pepper. It’s funny how you know whether a house is empty or not as soon as you step into it. I used to feel as though you were still here. I don’t any more. Is that good or bad, do you think?
I’ve cut out nearly all the hexagon templates. Mel says we made enough quilts when we were kids to excuse us for the rest of this lifetime and at least five to come, but I like doing it. I like the way time goes by faster when I’m doing it. You wouldn’t think fifteen hexagons cut from old cardboard means a whole hour gone, but it does.
Love, love, love
E xxxx
Between
WHEN MICHAEL AND Elizabeth came back from the spa, Michael had done everything he could to stop seeing Kate. He didn’t dare see her to tell her: just the thought of her made him unsettled, and he didn’t trust himself in the flesh. So he cut himself off. It was kinder, better for both of them. That was what he had told himself, anyway.
He’d arranged to go dog-walking with Blake and Hope, nodding brightly to Kate on the one occasion that they passed her on the way to Butler’s Pond. ‘Pretty girl,’ Blake had said, and Michael had grunted what he hoped passed for casual agreement rather than permanent ache, amazed by how different she looked in the presence of another: younger, smaller, freshly beautiful. The fact that he couldn’t touch her, acknowledge her, hurt him more than he’d anticipated.
She’d hidden her disappointment well; Michael’s phone had remained silent, his walks with Blake or Elizabeth uninterrupted.
By day, he had congratulated himself on being free of her. Her silence only confirmed that he was doing the right thing. Walking past the place at Butler’s Pond where they’d had sex, Michael had remembered only the seedy indignity
of it, and wondered at his own idiocy. Finding a moon-silver hair in the car, he had a crashing realization of the damage he could have done to his beautiful Elizabeth; felt himself to be the man who had got off the train at the stop before the crash. He pretended that he hoped she had found a boyfriend.
But at night, his furtive feelings had stopped him from sleeping. He knew it wasn’t love, because love was what he felt when he looked at Elizabeth. But he was having a hard time pretending it was nothing. It was just the sex, he told himself, it was just that watching her discover all that the body could do had reminded him of the possibility of it, made him forget the limitations. Looking in the mirror as he shaved, he recognized a fool; a supposed adult who was suffering over something that was never going to last, and so shouldn’t have a lasting impact.
So he had started to run. Really run. He had thought if he was tired enough, he would sleep enough, and if he slept enough, he would stop thinking about Kate, who seemed to have vanished: she was never at Butler’s Pond, never sauntering out of the end of her road when he was walking past, never nearby when he finished work. Michael had started to comprehend just how much effort must have gone into those casual sightings and meetings: everything that Kate had done to be near him made him feel as though water was rising around him.
And if the running meant sleep and sleep meant that he stopped thinking about Kate – well, he would have stopped thinking about Kate. Mission accomplished.
He asked Elizabeth about signing up for the Marsham Marathon with him. It was the first they had run together, and so even when they weren’t taking part they always went along and cheered. It was a marker in their lives, their love. It was exactly the thing, he thought, that would heal him, and bring them closer again. Not that they were distant, exactly; but there must have been a chink where Kate could get in.
Elizabeth declined; the thought of training through the winter was too much, she said. Michael, ever mindful of how he had taken her from her native land, of how he had asked so much of her and failed to give her the thing she wanted most, felt a new nerve twitch.
‘I don’t want to go out running with you,’ Elizabeth had said one evening, watching her husband as he stood, just inside the doorway, hands on knees, breath burning in and out, sweat gathering in a point on his nose, dripping, ‘but I miss seeing you.’ And she’d smiled, saying with that smile: I offer this not as a criticism, but an example of my own flawed self. She’d looked cool, eerie, in the kitchen as his eyes had adjusted to coming indoors. And he’d thought, oh, God, another thing. Another tiny way in which this Kate business is hurting Elizabeth.
And the running didn’t even work. It had been a Tuesday afternoon. Michael had stopped at the fallen tree to refasten his laces, have a drink, and wonder why he ever thought this was a good idea. His lungs blazed, sweat stung his eyes, his muscles sang with the promise of cramp to come, and still he was thinking of Kate. He was no longer sleepless, it was true, but in these nights he dreamed of her pale eyes, her soft skin, and found himself examining Elizabeth’s face every morning with the fear of having breathed out the wrong name in the darkness. He came to be glad of the late shifts, the early shifts, which he had once resented for putting him out of step with his wife. However often he went over the last few months in his mind, he couldn’t find the place where he lost control of himself: and he couldn’t see where to get control back.
And then, as he had got ready to run another lap, Kate had stepped through the grass towards him, her hair tied back so that every clean remembered line of her face was open to him, her eyes hurt, her body brave. She approached him like an equal; like a lover; like a person to be taken seriously. Michael had felt, once more, the water rising around him, chilling his chest now.
‘Mike,’ she had said, quietly, and sat down next to him, ‘I thought we should talk.’
‘Yes,’ the neutrality of her tone made him ashamed, a schoolboy caught in a lie, ‘I’m sorry, Kate, I didn’t know how to tell you that I thought we should stop.’
‘Oh, you told me all right.’
Michael had been helpless in the face of such quiet hurt. He had been prepared for this meeting to happen: he had been ready to be comforting and strong, or calming and firm. But Kate’s solemn honesty had demanded solemn honesty back. ‘I felt as though I was getting out of my depth,’ he had said. ‘I love my wife very much, and I never meant – I didn’t mean—’
‘I know,’ she had said, ‘me neither.’
They had glanced at each other, then, daring a look instead of talking to the air in front of them. She had been the first to smile. ‘You’re not exactly what I had planned, you know, Mike.’
He had been the first to risk a touch, his hot damp hand covering her cool smooth one where it sat, demure, in her lap. She hadn’t responded; but she hadn’t taken her hand away.
And, although he hadn’t thought he would ever talk to anyone about this, he had tried to explain to Kate how much more bound he was to his wife than anyone else might be to theirs. Her commitment in coming to live in Throckton, the baby that never was, the way they had built a life together. He wanted her to understand that he was happy: he wanted her to understand that he would never leave Elizabeth. ‘I’ll be honest, Kate,’ he had said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me. I never thought I would be …’ He had faltered, and Kate had turned towards him, lifted her hand to his jaw, her thumb smooth as it stroked beneath the cleft in his chin.
‘I know,’ she had said, ‘I know,’ and she’d turned her face away and told him how, when she had realized that he didn’t want to see her, she had decided to go away to think, and forget him. She had been to Paris, to stay with a friend who was studying there. She had been angry, upset. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ she’d said, ‘how much you mean to me. Unless you feel the same way. And I think you are a good man. I don’t think you would use me.’
Michael, who had his arm around her by then because he couldn’t seem to find a way to not touch her, felt her voice move through his chest. He has always known that he is a good man.
Kate didn’t tell him about the tears and the endless discussion of what she should, could do, the speculation about the future that the two of them might have, the ways in which that future might come about. She had gloried in the feeling that she only got when she was with Mike: the feeling of love, of happiness, of saturation, all combined into something that couldn’t be wrong.
Nerve endings had danced in her hip where his hand sat.
She knew that she had to be gentle.
‘I need you to know,’ she had said, ‘that I will never, ever tell anyone about us. I want you to know that I can keep a secret and I will keep this one, for—’ She had been choosing between ‘for ever’ and ‘for as long as we need to’ when he had interrupted her.
‘Thank you,’ he had said, ‘thank you.’ It had felt as though Elizabeth was safe again.
It was a very short distance from the eyes-front to the eyes-locked, the touch to the kiss. Kate, who had once been a holiday, was becoming a home.
When she had got her phone out and suggested that she take a picture of them, he’d agreed, and smiled and held her for the camera, and thought, well, I’m really in this now.
Mike,
There were times when I wondered how happy you were. Especially that bit after we decided not to have a baby – I say ‘bit’ as though it was no time, but I think there were probably a good three months when we were finding our feet again. And you were so quiet. And you were so calm. And when I asked you about adoption, and said I felt as though I couldn’t put us through any more baby-waiting and baby-stress, any more time being patient … You just said, sure, and the way you said it was the way you had agreed when I said I thought I would prefer apple-white to peach-white for the paint colour in the downstairs loo. It was as though it was all the same to you. And although I could understand that when it came to choosing between two shades of white to go in a tiny windowless room – a b
aby, Mike? A child?
I assumed, at the time, that you wanted to do what I wanted, because you were looking after me, and so I didn’t ever really think about it too hard. We were so tired, weren’t we? Sometimes all this missing you feels a little bit familiar, and I realize that the pain is like the pain of knowing that you’ll never be a mother. It’s the certainty. I won’t see you again. I won’t have a baby. And for a moment or two those things are bearable. It’s when you look up, look forward, that it gets terrible.
Sometimes I wonder whether not having a baby was a rehearsal for not having you. The universe breaking me in gently. The breaking part is definitely true. There’s nothing gentle about this, though.
E xxx
Now
AS SOON AS Rufus has gone, Mel makes tea for Elizabeth, and tells her that she’s taking Pepper for a walk. Then she heads off to Patricia’s house. The fact that she knows it’s Patricia’s day off only makes her angrier with this mad, incestuous place.
‘You’re my cover story,’ she growls to Pepper, who tries to lick her hand as she attaches his lead, ‘so I’m going to have to take you. But it’s not like my day isn’t already ruined.’
As she stalks through the streets she lets a call from Blake go to voicemail: she doesn’t trust her own voice, and she doesn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to suggest a more measured response to what she’s just learned.
She thinks about what she will say, later, to Blake and Andy: that tact and diplomacy and quiet conversations and a whole load of dancing about have done nothing but cause pain and upset for all of them. Her heels are furious on the pavement.
Patricia answers the door in an apron, hands covered in flour. As though butter wouldn’t melt in your mean little mouth, Mel thinks, as Patricia says, ‘Oh, Mel, I’m just baking.’
‘So I see.’
‘Well,’ Patricia says, ‘if you’re coming in, would you mind taking your shoes off? And I’m not really set up for dogs.’
Mel looks her full in the face, a look that feels like a blow, and says, slowly and quietly, so that the older woman has to lean closer to hear her, blinking as the brightness of the day hits her, ‘Yes, Patricia, I would mind. So either you can let me in with my heels and this mop on a string, or we can talk about cystic fibrosis on your doorstep. You decide.’
Letters to My Husband Page 20
