by Monica Ali
I said to my husband, ‘They must have been doctors, these women, or nurses. I mean, to be able to get the baby out alive.’
He said, ‘No, it’s simple, you just cut straight down. It’s simple as long as you don’t have the mother’s life to consider.’ Like he could do it easily, like it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
For him, you see, it was something else to store, to know. These things occurred. Events took place. Facts. An accumulation of facts.
I sometimes think it all comes down to the factory. It makes cake decorations and accessories, not the ones you can eat but the ribbons and trimmings, foil boards, Happy Birthday signs, candle holders, reindeer and Santa Clauses, plastic foliage, paper doilies. He inherited it from his father and he’s always hated it and never said so.
Boxers don’t throw their weight around out of the ring.
My husband is always learning stuff. Serious, he’d say, but it’s still just stuff. It doesn’t help. His idea of a holiday is to go somewhere very far away and gorge on facts. He could tell you the exact altitude of Machu Picchu, or the number of inhabitants in the largest of the Cape Town shanties, or the price of a helicopter ride over the favelas in Rio, or the ethnic classification of the fourteen tribes of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. His holidays (we started ‘taking turns’ about ten years ago) are always amazing. Knock-out. Just that – I’m flattened by the time we get home, knocked right out.
We stayed three nights in a hut that belonged to a Mru king in the emerald hills close to the Burmese border. ‘Doesn’t this feel too weird?’ I said. ‘To be here. To consume this.’
‘It’s not about consuming, Eileen,’ he said, ‘it’s about understanding. You could read about these tribal people for decades without understanding if you’ve never lived amongst them.’
‘For three days?’ I said.
‘Where’s the mosquito net?’ he said. ‘They specifically said mosquito nets provided.’
‘What about Richard? He’s our son. You could try understanding him.’
He slapped his neck and said, ‘There’s one. Did you remember your malaria tablet this morning?’
‘Go out with him,’ I said. ‘Go to his pubs and clubs. See it as a holiday. Live amongst them.’
He said, ‘Any sane person, Eileen,’ and switched off the electric lantern.
We met an English couple in a village where we stopped for coffee. I don’t know how they ended up at our table. The man had no shirt, just a denim waistcoat that was as filthy as his jeans and his eyes looked like all the blood vessels were about to burst. The woman was more presentable but she reminded me of Buster when he’s just had his tail trodden on. They’d been out here nearly five years. My husband asked what they did, for a living he meant. ‘Chill,’ said the man, ‘mainly, like,’ and my husband nodded as if he too mainly chilled.
We had coffee and chatted, like new friends at the Rotary.
My husband said, ‘Fascinating region, the Alentejo. Undiscovered.’
And at breakfast he’d been saying there’s a reason for that, Eileen, there’s a reason why it’s undiscovered.
The man said, ‘Poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union. Until all them eastern monkeys climbed on board.’
My husband nodded as if he had been on the verge of saying this himself.
‘Highest male suicide rate though,’ said the man. ‘Still holds the record for that.’
‘Right,’ said my husband, storing it up.
‘All these old geezers. Found another one today, they did. Gone and strung hisself up in the woods.’
‘Awful,’ said the woman. She shivered and rubbed her arms.
‘Yeah,’ said the man. ‘I’d stick a gun in me mouth but never a rope round me neck.’
‘Now,’ said my husband, moving things along, ‘if you had to rank these villages here from one to ten, ten being a definite visit and one being give it a miss, how do you think they’d score?’
They didn’t look, to me, like the most reliable of sources but the man kept spurting information and my husband was taking it all in. At least he’s enjoying himself, I thought. But we were driving out towards Aljustrel in the afternoon and he started biting on his top lip. ‘Is it bad?’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, Eileen,’ he said, ‘but I’m turning the car around as soon as I can.’
We went back to our room and I set about drawing the curtains but he said no, he was going to read. I knew then it wasn’t a migraine though we kept up the pretence.
He sat on the bed and didn’t look at me.
‘Shall I stay with you?’ I said.
He turned his head so I couldn’t see his expression. ‘You know how it is.’
I didn’t move right away. I gave him some time. If you can’t talk on holiday when can you?
In the end I said, ‘Poor you,’ and picked up my bag and went out.
At the beach I walked in the wet sand looking down at my feet and watching the way the indentations smoothed over almost as soon as I lifted my toes. I was thinking, I suppose, about my husband and Richard and the whole situation. Not in any proper way though, not so as I could say what I was thinking. I was feeling it and walking it and breathing it. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking at all. It’s been nearly two years now. My husband has these times. Bereaved people are the same. Sometimes they buckle for no apparent reason, like some internal structure just collapsed, and they carry on with hard, bright eyes pretending to be normal or they take themselves off and don’t want to talk. They say, with bereavement, that after two years it begins to get better.
I felt bad for my husband. He didn’t have a headache but I could see the hurt anyway. All that tension round his mouth and his shoulders slumping like that. What I should have done is sat down next to him on the bed. And . . . what?
I can worry something to death and come up with a solution. It’s got to be a small thing though. Not that they seem small at the time. They get to be enormous and take over everything. Like Janet Larraway’s cherry cake.
Janet is someone I don’t see very often. We used to live down the street from them, down the cul-de-sac actually, when we were on the estate (an executive housing estate, I must point out, not the other kind). Janet’s house crowned the top of the road at right angles to the other houses, like it was presiding over the whole street, which Janet actually did. Anyway, she came to visit with a rather feeble bunch of freesias and a cherry cake. The cake was obviously shop-bought but she’d taken off the wrappings and set it on a plate. We sat in the kitchen and Janet said, ‘Eileen, I’m glad to see you’ve finally got rid of those awful brown tiles round the cooker. Those new ones are interesting. Sort of Neapolitan ice-cream would you say?’
I made proper coffee and Janet enlightened me about her new coffee grinder. I cut the cake and we each had a slice. It wasn’t Mr Kipling but it wasn’t much better than that, something from a supermarket rather than a proper bakery. I said, ‘Delicious cake, Janet.’ Then I said, ‘You can’t beat home-made.’ I thought perhaps her expression changed but she didn’t say anything. I started to get a bit desperate. I said, ‘You must give me the recipe. I’d love to have a go myself. Unless it’s a family secret, of course, ha, ha.’ And all the time I was thinking shut up, just shut up.
Janet said, ‘We’ve missed you, Eileen. We’ve all missed you. Sarah Baxendale says to tell you she knows she’s still got your Pyrex and she’s sorry but her grandson’s started a worm farm in it and can she keep it a bit longer?’
I hardly slept a wink. I kept going over and over it: what I’d said, what she’d said, how much longer she’d stayed, how she looked when she left, how we had somehow omitted to kiss at the door, whether I’d waved too hard and too long as she pulled away in the Saab. The next day was the same. Family secret, of course, ha, ha. There was no obvious way out. I thought of ringing her up, but what would I say? ‘Just in case you thought I was being sarcastic, I wanted to say I did really like your cake, really.’ Or, ‘Look, th
ere’s nothing wrong with shop-bought. I just wanted to let you know.’
Oh, it was a mess. But I worked and worked on it, you know, trying different scenarios in my head, seeing how they played out, thinking through the angles, calculating the odds, weighing the pros and cons. Everything else I did that day I did on automatic pilot. I can be very focused when I want to be.
And I don’t even care about Janet Larraway; her or her stupid cake. I don’t now and I didn’t then. I can think of a hundred reasons not to care.
These things happen to me though. I always know, as well, that in a couple of days or weeks or however long, it will seem silly. Silly and trivial and absurd. Think about that time with Douglas Enright, I tell myself, when it turned out he hadn’t even heard what you said in the first place. Think about all the things you’ve worried and fretted and schemed about that you can’t even remember any more!
Those are the small things. The ones it is possible to think about in minute detail. The big things aren’t like that. They’re the stuff that we breathe in and breathe out, the things that we don’t solve like puzzles. They’re the stuff that we walk through, denting the surface, like the sand beneath my toes.
I didn’t ring Janet, I sent her a card – a note to say thank you for the flowers and the cake, just plain ‘cake’ and ‘thank you’, no messing about with adjectives. What I did, I wrote that a bunch of us were hoping to start a book group and that since she was so experienced we would be ever so grateful if she could think of coming to speak at our inaugural meeting and offering a few pointers. I had it just about right. The right mix of briskness and fealty that she’d warm to. Of course, then I had to actually start a book group but I didn’t mind. I almost convinced myself that I was going to in any case.
Right now I’m thinking about getting up and making the final ascent to the church. But it’s rather a lovely spot here beneath this pergola and the heat has been building up. It’s jagged heat, sharp, like you might cut yourself if you moved too quickly. This weight I’m carrying doesn’t help.
Perhaps I’ll take a while longer. There’s an aviary here though maybe that sounds a bit grand: there’s a cage about the size of a dovecote with a parrot, three canaries and two tiny feathered harlots flashing around a seed tray. There’s a drinking fountain, an ornamental fountain and picnic benches. I’ve been watching a mother feed her baby with orange gloop. He stuck his fist in the pot and tried to suck it off while the mother tried to wipe it off with a muslin cloth. It turned into quite a battle. The baby thought it was fun at first but then got into a panic, like this was the last food he was ever going to see, right there on his fist, and his own mother was taking it away. She’s young, mid-twenties I’d say, with wavy black hair and a turquoise T-shirt that shows her tight little belly button. A few times she happened to look over and see me watching and the first couple of times she smiled and I smiled back but after that it got to be a bit uncomfortable and I had to turn away.
The far side of the square is formed by the walled and terraced garden of a house that must once have been splendid and is now rather dignified. There’s a sweep of steps up, balustrades and verandas and balconies and what look like, from this distance, gargoyles above the entrance. The garden is overgrown but inviting; the orange trees along the perimeter have the darkest, shiniest leaves, and there is a row of sunflowers positively crowing out on the middle terrace. I’ve been wondering if the house belonged to Dr Fernando dos Santos Agudo. There’s a bronze bust of him here, a bald, bespectacled man in jacket and tie. He died in 1989 and, though I would have said that I don’t know any Portuguese, I have read on the inscription that he served four generations of the people of this town ‘com grande competência’.
Who gets their own bronze bust in England these days? Not doctors, I expect.
Well, I think I should stir. Pleasant as it is. My husband must be looking for me by now and I ought to be making my way, down not up, back to the café by the Galp station.
I wish I were a bit lighter on my feet and could contemplate a dash to the church first. I was looking at this menopause website (incredible how the internet hypnotizes you) and it had a list: menopause myth and fact. One of the myths, apparently, is that you always put on weight. A lot of women don’t. Another myth is that you suffer some kind of memory loss. And another is that you lose interest in sex.
I’m afraid I must be one of those women who generate the myths in the first place.
With sex it’s not that I don’t like the idea. I can see a young couple walking along, their hips brushing, and remember how it was. I don’t mean I get nostalgic. I mean I feel it: a surge in every body cavity, a tingle in my toes.
My husband has a way of holding my hand that means he has the idea, though in his case he means to act on it. He holds my hand but works his index finger loose and strokes my palm, the edge of my thumb, the inside of my wrist.
He’s a good man, my husband, one of the best. Ask anyone. The girls at the factory all love him. I say girls but they’re grandmothers mostly, working for pin money, or perhaps for the rent, I don’t know. He teases them (‘On a go-slow today, eh, Sylvie? We’ll get you embalmed one of these days, put you in a case on the landing.’) and they tease him right back (‘Come over here, Mr Mowatt, June’s got a twist in her stocking and she wants you to set it straight.’).
He’s got a robust way about him, I know. Any sane person, Eileen. But that’s just him: his energy, his life bursting out. Let’s get this show on the road.
The factory’s never been enough for him. Cake decorations are not enough for him. Business is business, he says, but you know he doesn’t mean it. Has to be twice the man, that’s what he thinks.
Hands. I used to spend a lot of time looking at hands. It was my party trick when I was young. I read people’s fortunes. My husband-to-be called me Gypsy Rose Lee and studied my palm.
He said, ‘You’re going to be proposed to by a dashing young man in possession of a Triumph Stag and a birthmark behind his right ear and you’re going to have five children and live happily ever after.’
He didn’t know how to read the lines. I knew we’d only have one child.
Today, in the car, waiting for a flock of sheep to cross, I said, ‘Isn’t this more like it? More like a holiday?’
He said, ‘You know the etymology of the word, Eileen? Do you? Well, that’s how I feel about holidays. That’s what they are to me.’
When did he start doing that? Using my name only when he wants to make me feel stupid.
I’ve got sweat patches under my arms that have spread right round to the front of my bra. Like I’ve been leaking milk. What a sight for sore eyes! We’ll go back to the pousada and I’ll freshen up. I fancy sardines for dinner. We’ll have a bottle of Mateus Rosé, I’ll insist on it though he can be quite the wine snob, and I’m going to cut right through the sarcasm with cheeriness. You can always defeat sarcasm in the end with cheeriness. It’s quite a good weapon actually; a blunt instrument but a strong one.
It’s easy to forget that sometimes. About a month after Richard first told us he was gay, I sat my husband down to talk about it. Not that he’d said he had a problem with it. He just hadn’t said anything at all. So I got the coffee and biscuits ready and I sat him down and said, ‘I think we ought to discuss it. You know, Richard’s being gay and all that.’
He said, ‘Right. Go on then.’
I took a bourbon cream and tucked my feet up on the sofa, all casual, and said, ‘Well, how do you feel about it?’
And he said, ‘This isn’t one of your daytime shows, Eileen.’ He pointed to the biscuit plate and the coffee pot and screwed up his face like he was just disgusted by it all and then he got up and it was over and I was sitting there chewing on a bourbon cream and I think I finished the lot.
I know what he meant though. All that pawing away at emotion. Sharing. Half the time it’s only making the problem worse. Sometimes it seems like it’s inventing the problem in the first place.
There’s this other menopause website and on the ‘home page’ it has this quotation, I don’t know who said it, about menopausal women having to ‘mourn the loss of fertility’. Have you ever heard such rot? Your childbearing years are long gone. I mean, I’m fifty-six. It’s ridiculous. I got over that a long time ago.
It has occurred to me that it’s not Richard he’s angry with but me. You can’t be angry with your son for being gay, not in this day and age, not unless you are one of those dads on the morning shows. Maybe he thinks I should have known. Maybe he thinks I did know, that I read it in his stars or in his palm and kept quiet about it and that’s made him really seething inside.
Though of course he doesn’t believe in any of that nonsense, so I don’t even know why these things occur to me. But you can know something’s not true and still think it anyway. There’s only so much you can do with reason and rationality. They don’t take you all the way. Whatever my husband says. And if they do then what’s his problem? If they do, then why has he spent the last two years avoiding his own son?
He’d never admit it though. I asked him once, ‘Why do you always sniff your book before you open it? What are you smelling?’
‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘I don’t sniff my book.’
‘You just did. Just now. Right before you opened it.’
He looked at me and chewed his lip like he always does when he’s thinking something through and I could see him remembering, realizing I was right. ‘Oh that,’ he said, ‘that is a pause, a moment of reflection to locate myself in the text, where I left off the previous night.’
‘Do they all smell different?’ I said.
‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I’m trying to read.’
There’ll be no grandchildren, of course. I don’t mind that, not really. I wouldn’t have time, not with all the donkeys to take care of.
