Expectation

by Anna Hope

  ‘Tell her I had to see Hannah. Tell her we’ll see her next week. Tuesday. Tamsin’s arranging it. Remember?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Cool.’ He leans in, high-fives Tom, gives her a brief kiss on the cheek. ‘Look after yourselves. You sure you’re going to be all right?’

  ‘We’ll be fine!’ The brightness in her voice makes her wince.

  She pounds down the road, past the scrubby patch of grass with its one tree, past the supermarket, down the underpass and out at the crumbled edges of the city walls. If she keeps going like this, she might outpace her tiredness. Sun strikes off flint, but it is chilly. The season is turning; the air here has a bracing twist that she doesn’t remember feeling for years. The sea – it must be something to do with proximity to the sea. She is wearing only a thin jacket. She thinks about returning to the house, but to do so would be to risk defeat – if she does so, she might pluck Tom from the buggy and give up. And he is happy enough, kicking his legs, looking from left to right, practising his wave on the dogs and the passers-by.

  He is good on the train too, standing on her thigh and bouncing, trying his legs out for size as the flat estuary lands of England pass by. Her phone buzzes. Hannah.

  You still OK for this morning?

  Yes!

  She adds a smiley face, something she would have avoided in the past, but today, for the sake of speed and this new primary-coloured brightness she feels, it seems appropriate.

  But by the time the train is slowing for London, Tom is tired and fractious and has missed the window for his nap. He protests when she tries to get him into the buggy on the platform, bucking and twisting away from the straps. She bends down and rummages through her bag for the Tupperware, but the bag, large and voluminous and many-pocketed, is reluctant to give it up. She locates it eventually, takes out a rice cake and brandishes it towards Tom. ‘Here! Here, darling.’

  He is crying properly now, real tears on his cheeks. He doesn’t want a rice cake. He probably wants a feed. She kneels before the buggy. ‘Just – hold on. Please. You can sleep soon.’

  She pushes the buggy a little way down the platform, but Tom is beside himself and so she stops and takes out the thinner of the two slings, the one she has used since he was tiny, the one Sam would put him in and sing to him. Sam. She would put up with any number of his comments and sideswipes to have him here beside her. But he’s not here. There is no cavalry, no deus ex machina. She is the grown-up now.

  ‘Hang on,’ she says, her voice getting tighter, as people cast quick, worried looks towards her. ‘Hang on, darling.’ She slots the sling in place, ties its origami folds tightly and manages to get Tom into it. It is like wrestling an octopus. He twists against her chest, but finally the crying eases and soothes and they both breathe together.

  ‘OK?’ she says, stroking his back through the sling. ‘OK. OK?’

  He is drifting into sleep. Now. She can either pace up and down the platform until he sleeps more deeply, or walk on, to the Tube, and risk him waking up. After a look at her watch she decides on the latter.

  The Tube is loud, louder than she can ever remember it being, but Tom, mercifully, stays sleeping, his head on her chest. People look and smile, and she smiles back, but her heart is clanging. What if something were to happen – an attack of some sort? It just feels entirely wrong to have this tiny, sleeping infant in this carriage, this metal carriage in which it feels as if death could come in so many guises – which is tunnelling past the heaped bones of the dead, past the hungry ghosts of the city, and under the river – the river – which in and of itself must be dangerous, must it not? How has she not considered these things before?

  She should never have left the house.

  Tom sleeps on but she is a tight knot of worry now, her hand rigid against his back. Please. Please don’t wake. Not now. Not yet. Not till we’re there.

  And he doesn’t, the movement of the train keeping him rocked and unconscious – he sleeps still as she wrangles the buggy on to the escalator, leaving the Underground at Camden, as she walks to the overground, as she takes the train to Gospel Oak, and it is only as she is rounding the gates of the Heath that he lifts his lovely sleepy head and looks around.

  ‘Oh, hello! Hello, darling!’ She is jubilant, on the verge of tears, she is so relieved. ‘Look! Look at all the trees. The leaves! Can you see? Can you see?’

  It is a beautiful morning. The broad swathe of Highgate Hill in the distance is alight with reds and golds and browns. There are runners, dog walkers; elegant couples in matching down jackets gesticulate as they talk in French, Italian, Arabic. It is the Great World and she is a part of it. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she says, taking him out of the sling and strapping him into the buggy, then making her way to the cafe at the bottom of Parliament Hill, the cheap one, their favourite, the old Italian where you can still get ice-cream sandwiches and scrambled eggs on toast. She sees Hannah before she has been seen herself, sitting alone at a table outside.

  ‘Hey! Hey, Hannah!’

  She is shouting, sweaty and shouting, but she doesn’t seem able to lose this terrible jaunty tone. Hannah looks up.

  Hannah stands, a hug – the scent on her neck of something expensive and restrained – and then she bends to Tom. ‘Hey, little one.’

  Hannah is dressed in a sleek woollen winter coat; her hair looks as though it has recently been attended to by a very good hairdresser.

  ‘You look nice,’ says Cate, gathering her breath.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Cate searches Hannah’s face for signs of stress, but can see none, finds rather that her gaze falls off it, as though Hannah is coated in something smooth and impenetrable, a rock face with no hand- or footholds, while she feels porous. More than. It is as though there are great gaping holes in her that anyone might be able to see into, poke around in and pass judgement upon the mess within. She is sweating, and Tom, when she lifts him out, is sweating too.

  ‘Oh,’ says Hannah, staring at Tom. ‘He’s wet.’

  ‘It’s just sweat.’

  Hannah nods. ‘But his chest, it’s soaked. It’s quite chilly, isn’t it?’

  Hannah is right. He has drooled all over himself. He is teething and she should have brought a dribble bib. Why didn’t she bring a bib? His chest is covered with sweat and drool and he is tiny and he is teething and Hannah is right, it is not warm – the season has changed while she was hiding inside the house. ‘Here, just a sec.’ She thrusts him at Hannah, who takes him and puts him on her knee.

  ‘Hey, Mister.’ Tom twists round and stares at Hannah doubtfully, and Cate can see the momentary flash of panic on Hannah’s face.

  ‘He’s fine. He’s just woken—’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Hannah lifts her hand. ‘We’re cool.’

  Cate bends to the buggy, rummages for his change of clothes. The bag again. The fucking bag is terrorizing her. ‘Here!’ She has a clean jumper in her hands. She holds it up to Hannah, who nods and smiles. It is impossible to convey the sense of achievement inherent in this find, so Cate says nothing. Instead she begins to wrest the jumper over Tom’s head, then thrusts him a rice cake, which he takes happily as she shoves a hat on his head.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  ‘Will you be OK with him if I go and get a coffee?’

  ‘Sure. We’ll be great, won’t we, Tom?’

  Tom kicks his feet and grins.

  ‘You want anything?’

  ‘No. Really, I’m fine.’

  Cate stands, makes her way into the cafe and joins the queue at the counter, casting frequent looks back towards where Hannah and Tom sit, Hannah with her hand raised, pointing to something just out of sight. She scans the herbal teas, decides against them, orders a cappuccino and a pastry, dumps two sugars into the coffee and carries them back out into the morning.

  Breathe.

  ‘Tell me what’s happening then.’ Cate puts down her coffee and sits.

  ‘There’s really nothing much to tell. I’m havin
g a menopause right now. I’m sweating. I’m irritable. It’s pretty horrible, but it won’t last long.’

  ‘But you look great!’ cries Cate, and she reaches out and touches Hannah’s sleeve. A strange, reflexive action – she wants something of that sleekness for herself. Hannah’s hand comes down on her own.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ says Cate.

  I think I might be losing my mind.

  There is a pause. Cate blows on her coffee while Tom chirrups on Hannah’s lap, and she stares at her lovely child in the arms of her oldest friend and feels sudden, stupid tears in her eyes. She bends to wipe them before Hannah sees. But she has seen, of course she has.

  ‘Hey, you’re crying.’

  Cate nods. The tears are streaming now. ‘I’m OK. I promise. It’s just—’

  There is snot; there is nothing to deal with the snot, only a small, thin napkin on the side of her coffee, beneath the plastic-wrapped biscuit. She blows her nose and the napkin dissolves in her hands.

  ‘Here.’ Hannah reaches into her bag for tissues and Cate takes a tissue from the packet and blows her nose. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I am tired. Tom wakes so often to feed in the night.’

  ‘That’s tough.’ Hannah nods. She leans in to Tom and whispers in his ear. ‘Hey. Listen, you. You give your mum a break. She needs to sleep.’

  ‘You watch,’ Cate says. ‘When you have this baby, you’ll have a sleeper. You’ll have it on a routine from day one.’

  Hannah laughs. ‘Yeah, well, let’s see. How’s Sam?’

  ‘He’s OK. Well, maybe he’s OK. I’m not sure. They offered to take Tom for me, one day a week. Tamsin, Sam’s sister, and Sam’s mum.’

  ‘But that’s great!’ says Hannah. ‘Free childcare. Isn’t that part of why you moved out there?’

  ‘I suppose it is.’ Cate looks at Tom, who is flapping his arms with great enthusiasm at a nearby dog. ‘But what if he turns out like them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t really mean that. I just—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes I feel I failed.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Everything.’ She lifts the balled-up tissue in her fist. ‘I didn’t even have tissues today. My mum always had tissues. That’s just what mums do. And I’m scared.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Everything. The future. Climate change. War. I keep thinking what sort of world it will be, when he’s our age.’ She circles her hand with her opposite wrist, her thumb touching the spider, just hidden from sight. ‘And I keep thinking about Lucy. About where she is.’

  ‘Lucy? Really?’ Hannah’s expression darkens. ‘I’m sure wherever she is she’s fine. Come on, Cate, you’ve got Tom. You’ve got Sam. You’ve got your life.’

  ‘But what if it’s not my life?’

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’

  ‘I just feel—’

  ‘What? What do you feel?’

  Lonelylonelylonelyallthefuckingtime.

  ‘Sometimes I feel …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That maybe it was irresponsible. Having a child at all.’

  And just like that she feels Hannah detach – arms folded, head turned. Feels the morning, with all its promise, drain away from her, drain from them all.

  ‘Cate,’ says Hannah, her voice tight, ‘listen to me. Take the offer of childcare. Have a day a week to yourself. Sleep. And I think you should see someone. A doctor.’

  ‘A doctor?’

  ‘If you’re depressed,’ says Hannah slowly, ‘there are things you can do. You’ve been here before. Go and see the doctor. Take some pills. Get better. Please.’ She lifts Tom, places him back on Cate’s lap. ‘Come on, Cate, nip it in the bud. For Tom, if not yourself. And he’s cold,’ she says. ‘Tom’s cold. Let’s go inside.’

  Lissa

  The first day of rehearsal is a crisp, early autumn day and Lissa rises early. In the shower she hums, sounding out her voice, running her tongue round her jaw. She chooses her outfit with care: a loose cotton shirt open at the neck, jeans and a necklace of red beads. No make-up other than a touch of mascara. She pins up her hair, shrugs on a man’s oversized jacket and winds a light scarf around her neck. She is nervous, but it is a manageable feeling, a sharpening, a slight fizz at the edge of things as she walks across the park, enjoying the pull of the morning tide, the fast pace of the walkers, the bikes. The air is clean, the leaves of the plane trees catch the early sun.

  As she walks she speaks to herself in a low voice, running over the speeches she has half memorised; they are using the Michael Frayn version, and she is coming to know it well already, to internalise its cadences, imagining herself into the part: Yelena, the young wife of an old man, buried in her marriage and thirsty for life.

  Yelena: You know what that means, having talent? It means being a free spirit, it means having boldness and wide horizons … he plants a sapling, and he has some notion of what will become of it in a thousand years’ time; he already has some glimpse of the millennium. Such people are rare. They must be loved …

  She is interested to see who is playing Astrov, the doctor with whom her Yelena will fall in love. Interested to see who is playing all of the parts she has been reading to herself over and over for the last three weeks.

  She arrives fifteen minutes early at the address written on the front of her script, a basement studio in Dalston tucked away on a side street between two Turkish restaurants, their fronts shuttered up against the morning. The director, Klara, is there already, in a corner of the room, speaking to someone who can only be the designer, their heads bent to a scale model of the set. She is shorter than Lissa remembered, dumpy even, grey hair in a dandelion frizz around her head. Ten or so chairs are set out in a circle for the actors, another row behind them for the technical staff. On a small side table a kettle steams into the bright air. A clear-faced young woman comes up, pumps Lissa’s hand and introduces herself as Poppy, the ASM. ‘Great to meet you! There’s coffee, pastries, help yourself.’

  Lissa drops her bag by a chair and wanders over to the table.

  ‘Might as well take advantage of the hospitality.’

  She turns to the voice and sees a man about her height standing beside her.

  ‘God knows when we’ll see its like again.’ There’s a faint northern accent to the bass growl. Scouse? He is clean-shaven, fifty or so, with grey in amongst the brown of his hair, which is longish, falling past his ears. His eyes are the most extraordinary blue. She knows him from somewhere. She must have seen him on stage but she cannot remember when. She goes to say something back, but he has turned and gone already, croissant in hand, over to his seat.

  ‘Lissa?’

  She turns to see a much younger man this time, thin-faced with wide-set eyes and thick lips. She meets his proffered hand. Does she know him?

  ‘Lissa Dane, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, I—’

  The young man laughs. ‘I just recognize your face. From pictures.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Didn’t you use to go out with Declan Randall?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I did.’

  ‘I love his work.’

  She nods. ‘Well, he’s a talented man.’

  ‘That last film – the one in the prison. The French director? Awesome.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it,’ she says.

  ‘You’re kidding.’ He shakes his head. ‘If I could have anyone’s career, it would be his.’

  She nods, finds her gaze sliding out to where the older actor is sitting. It is bugging her. His face. Where does she know it from?

  ‘So you’re not together any more?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not for a couple of years. He dumped me. For a make-up girl.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘That’s harsh.’

  ‘Yeah, well. He was an egotistical monster. So, you know.’
She picks up her coffee. ‘Silver linings and all that.’

  The room is filling up now, the hubbub around the coffee table increasing, the knot of actors spilling out into the room. The assistant stage manager is clapping her hands and gathering everyone together. Lissa and the young man, who tells her his name is Michael, wander over to the circle, where she takes her seat beside the older actor, who acknowledges her with a slight nod of the head.

  All of the chairs are taken. Klara makes her way to her place but stays standing, her gaze sweeping the circle as one by one her actors fall silent. She lets the silence swell until it fills the room, then touches her hand to her heart. ‘Here you are,’ she says. ‘Here you all are. And who are you? Tell us. Johnny.’ She nods to the man beside Lissa. ‘You begin.’

  ‘Johnny, Vanya.’

  A young, intense-looking woman in black jeans and a polo neck speaks next. ‘Helen, Sonya.’

  One by one they speak – Richard, Serebryakov; Greg, Astrov – and as they do so, the play populates itself: the elegant older woman playing Maria, Yelena’s mother-in-law; the woman who looks to be in her seventies playing Marina the nurse. Lissa watches Klara watch her actors – they all watch each other with wariness, with excitement, until the circle is complete and it is Lissa’s turn. ‘Lissa,’ she says, ‘Yelena.’

  ‘So,’ Klara says, ‘let us read this brilliant play.’

  As Johnny bends to the black leather bag at his feet and fishes out his script, it comes to Lissa where she knows him from – the call centre. She can picture him there now, sitting in the grotty break room with the same faintly disdainful look on his face. Something regal about him. Something tragic. Dressed all in black, with the same black leather briefcase at his feet.

  Hannah

  They have been told to report to the hospital early, and she and Nathan sit silently, side by side on hard plastic chairs nailed to the floor, as dawn breaks over London.

  Nathan scrolls through work emails on his phone as Hannah counts the couples. Seven of them. She knows the statistics: 24 per cent of those in her age bracket will conceive, 15 per cent of those older than her, slightly higher for those under thirty-five. She watches faces, guesses ages, tries to do the maths. How many of those sitting here will be lucky? One couple? Two?