He stretched, moving the duvet. The air chilled my nightie. ‘Lelia.’
‘I’ll think about it when I wake,’ I said, purposely yawning, burrowing into his stomach.
‘OK, my darling.’ He stroked my hair. ‘But I have to get to work early,’ he said in a low voice.
‘I have to sleep,’ I said, tiredness tugging me back already.
‘My seminar’s not till half-two.’ I pulled my knees up, almost to my chin.
‘Kiss me goodbye now,’ he said.
I caught the edge of his chin with a kiss. I slept.
When I woke, he had gone. I hoped that he hadn’t left imagining that I was in a mood: my supposed moodiness, which was only the unfortunate expression of my own anxiety, maddened him beyond anything else.
I took a pregnancy test out of the packet, though it was a day early, and peed on the stick. You had to wait for two minutes. Within seconds, a blue line had leapt into the second panel.
I sat on the loo with my head in my hands, and my future life spooled before me, just as they say the past spins by the dying.
I had a superstitious conviction that this pregnancy would last. Fear raced beneath the certainty, running black and fast, as though I stood on a bridge and glimpsed a dark millstream just below before I turned. My heart thumping, I phoned Richard at work. He was in conference. I left no message and sat still on the bed. My arm felt weak, still extended and holding the phone, a vein twitching under the skin. I stood on the mattress, stretching upwards to view my stomach in the mirror, and as I lowered my body again, a gurgle of a laugh escaped from me, a disturbed-sounding ‘Yahey’. I had to tell someone. I was meant to be marking some essays, but I put on my new, much-loved dusty-rose coloured coat and I walked towards my doctor’s on Great Russell Street, where I reported my pregnancy and the practice nurse offered her congratulations. I wanted my temperature to be taken by my kind Australian GP, who would offer brisk advice while understanding my own excitement, but she was busy. I walked up the stairs. I wished I could launch myself into Richard’s arms. Coming out on to the street, I bumped into Sylvie.
‘Oh!’ I said.
‘Oh, you!’ she said. Her smile caught her eyes and made her radiant. ‘You look beautiful today.’
I smiled back at her, as though she already knew my secret. Excitement pushed me. I tried to stop myself.
‘I’m pregnant!’ I said in a rush. My voice rose.
‘I know,’ she said. We laughed at each other nervously, almost embracing, then hesitating too long. Hug me, I thought. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
‘A baby …’ she said. ‘Oh, congratulations!’ She hugged me.
A bus boomed past.
‘Thank you,’ I said. Even among the traffic fumes, I absorbed her smell of expensive soap, of clean hair. ‘But how do you know?’
‘Because you were like a child, almost fainting with exhaustion.’
‘Oh – yes.’
‘It’s that intense tiredness. I’ve noticed it before when women conceive. I can recognise it.’
I could hear Richard’s voice in my head: ‘Mumbo fucking jumbo, sweetheart.’
‘There are tiny clues,’ she said.‘Nothing more.’ She glanced at my body.
I touched my neck. My breasts were sore, already slightly enlarged.
‘What am I doing telling you?’ I said, suddenly breathless. The sky was bright and rinsed above the museum. Christmas was very clearly past. ‘I wasn’t – I wasn’t safe before. I was only going to tell my mother, and one friend. Only the doctor’s nurse knows so far.’
‘Not Richard?’
‘Not even Richard!’
‘Oh!’ said Sylvie, and she sounded pleased. ‘Let’s go to a cafe. Let’s celebrate.’ She looked at her watch. Her nails were perfectly shaped ovals.
I thought of the empty flat; I pictured my attempts to read strained undergraduate arguments while new life bubbled inside me.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘They’re all for tourists’, she said, turning up her nose as we walked down Museum Street so that I laughed. The shopkeepers still washed the pavements. ‘This one’s OK-ish, though,’ she said, guiding me into a cafe displaying Italian crockery. She wore a fitted white shirt with large lapels, and a dark grey skirt, and I suspected again that her dull, muted clothes were in fact expensive and carefully chosen after all, since every aspect of her was so ordered and precise. She reminded me of a little French nun on a day out.
‘I’m pregnant!’ I said in an amazed whisper as we sat down.
‘Are you happy?’ asked Sylvie.
‘I’m happy at this very moment,’ I said. I considered the surprising truth of this statement. The sun came into the room and landed on a yellow bowl. I saw the human brushstrokes on its glaze melt into sun fluid.
‘Good,’ she said, and smiled, and the sun caught her skin too, making it so pale and clear that she looked like a breathing spirit, the minute pigmentation of her skin flaring to life. Her eyes in that strong light were not the nondescript hazel I had half absorbed, but a kind of bright brown, almost golden, with aspects of green.
‘Perhaps I’ll even know contentment when I’m very pregnant and as dozy as a cow.’
She laughed slightly. ‘I’d have loved a mother like you,’ she said with her disconcerting directness.
‘Would you?’ I flinched, feeling myself blush.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, casting her eye down the menu so that her hair stroked her brow. ‘You’ll love that baby, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I do, I thought. I do already.
She traced a pattern on the paper tablecloth with her fingertip, that delicate oval skimming the surface. ‘You’ll always love it. However much you think you love Richard, you’ll love this even more. It’ll be the great joy in your life.’
Her head was bent, following the pattern, and her hair fell forward, obscuring her face, though most of it was hooked behind her ears in the classic manner of square girls. She looked young and grave. I watched her ringless fingers tracing their pattern, the sunlight washing her naked skin, and again, I wanted to dress her. Not to make of her something that she wasn’t, but to dress her as a mother dresses her child, to make her warm and pretty. I almost wanted to take her on to my lap, but the impulse was absurd, and made me quiver with unwanted strands of sexual quickening, as though remnants of my nightmare stayed with me. I felt the remembered pressure of a body, heavy on my pubic bone, and instantly wanted to wipe away the image.
‘I will,’ I said. ‘But surely … any mother would. Someone has loved you too.’
She breathed through her nose with a small laugh of denial.
‘But you must have been loved,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘A parent would have been proud of you,’ I said. ‘And seen all your sensitivity and intelligence, and–’
‘No,’ she said simply.
‘Oh well, I–’
‘It’s all right,’ she said, and she looked up at me then, her gaze catching mine, resting upon me intensely for a few moments so that I had to smile in the face of her focus, her chin still semi-inclined towards the table until the angle made her eyes large and tilted. I knew who it was she reminded me of. I remembered The Lover. I thought of the photograph used on the cover – that bewitching little doll photograph, eyes bruise-shadowed through fading sepia, mouth impassive. A face that said hit me, worship me. The young Marguerite Duras. I used to read her all the time when I was a girl. I always thought that reading her work early had made me want to study French literature, and later, the nouveau roman.
‘It’s strange,’ I said,‘I think you might look like Marguerite Duras. It makes you look familiar to me.’
‘Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,’ she said in a rapid French accent. ‘L’Amant. “I have a face laid to waste.” I read L’Amant de la Chine du Nord recently.’
I smiled.
‘You know me through French literature, then,’ she said. ‘A face on a book. I know you more t
han that.’ She glanced at the table, her face, so marble and even, now faintly colouring under the scrutiny of the winter sunlight. Her mouth was quite beautiful. ‘Don’t you think?’
Heat hit my face. I hesitated. ‘Do you?’ I said.
‘I think so.’
I said nothing. My heartbeat began to speed. I wanted to break the awkwardness of the pause.
‘I feel – I feel as though you know me and I know you,’ she said.
She was silent.
‘I knew you were pregnant, didn’t I?’
‘I suppose so. My – boyfriend didn’t seem to realise, though. I want to tell him.’
‘Let’s go now then,’ she said decisively, and out on the street, she held my arm, or I held hers, as though I was already eight months pregnant, and we walked, her arm crooked slenderly in mine, all the way home.
As I looked up at the bedroom window, where the glass blankly reflected the light, I remembered the old nightmare. A sharp shudder went through me. I started feeling breathless, the recollection of a choking, rubbing sensation merging with a suspicion that I might imminently vomit. Yet beneath the panic, that nightmare thread of sexual arousal stirred again. The juxtaposition sickened me. I began to feel light-headed. I wanted to get away from her.
‘Goodbye,’ I said to her in a rush as saliva filled my mouth, and I ran upstairs and vomited before I could reach the sink.
Seven
Richard
MacDara rang me at work.
‘Something’s happened,’ he said.
‘What?’ I said.
He began to rap out instructions to someone in his office, as he tended to do, a different MacDara from the one I knew; I could picture him there a mile or so to the east of me, stubbled or sporting shaving nicks, his tie loosened. Bulls and bears, I thought, imagining MacDara in his high glass building in the City. MacDara was both, I thought: a bullish bear, growling and messing around.
‘Can we meet after work?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A quick one.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’
‘What have you done, you berk?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m in an open fucking plan office, Fearon.’
‘Get off the bloody blower,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you about seven.’
I put down the phone and looked at my diary. I glanced at the clock on my computer. The mousy girl was a little late for lunch. I was surprised. I didn’t really want to go out. We were having too much fun in the office that day, emailing round a developing pornographic story starring our much-loathed deputy features editor. Suppressed sniggers could be heard intermittently emerging from behind monitors. My best features friend Sophie and I were privately sending each other our own more obscene additions, and I had a whole special American issue to plan with my editor.
The receptionist rang to say that Sylvie had arrived. I reluctantly left my desk.
Where had this woman come from, I wondered, catching sight of the back of her coat? I didn’t really know. Ren? I thought of him and smiled. Trust Ren to cultivate a black sheep. Of course, Ren and his wife Vicky would want to help her, the way they embraced any number of oddities and strays – Albanian students, impoverished artists of a vaguely dissident nature, friends of distant cousins studying in London, and, quite frankly, terrible bores. Out of the kindness of his heart, a lack of social snobbery, and a sense of gratitude to a country in which he had found marriage, employment and happiness, dear Ren, the champion of the underdog, threw dinner parties featuring much broken English and smiling formality. Sylvie would have come in on the back of some outsider, some flatmate or foreign language student, and been unquestioningly accepted by Ren and his wife.
She had been waylaid, and had had tea with someone, Sylvie said. I was mildly put out. We went to the predictable gastro pub round the corner, everything char-grilled and seared under a tent of noise.
She had never been so reticent. She seemed like a naive girl, restrained by her own pride. She was private, chilly and entirely diffident. She hardly ate; she rarely talked; I could barely hear her voice. I tried to get her to share my wine to loosen her up, but she took a couple of sips and left it.
I glanced at the clock. Very nearly an hour had passed. All goodwill was finally subsumed by irritation.‘OK,’ I said.‘Sorry, but I’d better scarper. I’ve got a meeting.’
She turned to me. She paused.
‘Nice to see you. Sorry it’s so short, but I’ve really got to go.’
‘The office,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean … I think you’ve forgotten why we were going to meet. I was going to take away some books, wasn’t I?’
‘Books. Yes. Books. Those things. Shit! I forgot.’
‘I’d much rather have books than lunch.’
‘You were going to clear some of the toppling piles, weren’t you? God, I’m really sorry. Today’s almost impossible–’
I glanced at her. She said nothing.
I paused.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. Come quickly. Let’s go now, if you can rifle through them before my meeting.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
I spoke to a publicist while she knelt on the office floor and sifted through the piles of hardbacks as though she were a long-experienced secretary, checking the press releases, rejecting titles at a glance.
‘Take all those,’ I said, glancing at her modest selection. I put the phone down. ‘That one, though. What’s the publication date?’
She paused. ‘February the sixteenth,’ she said.
‘There’s still time to do it. Oh, but fuck it. Take it. I don’t need to review the old biddy anyway.’
‘Oh, but she’s – extraordinary,’ said Sylvie.
‘Is she? No one reads her.’
‘I do.’
‘Do you?’
‘All of her. Every single one. From the fifties onwards. The essays too.’
‘Really?’ I said, frowning. ‘How surprising. Take it, anyway. Hang on. Is she really that good? I’ve only read – what? – a bit of the famous stuff.’
‘Exceptional,’ she said quietly.
‘Do me a short review while you’re at it, then,’ I said in a cavalier fashion. I heard myself, and stopped. My stupid words rang in my ears. I tried to backtrack. ‘Well, maybe that’s pushing it–’
There was silence. I glanced at her; she knelt there, her lips slightly parted. There was further silence.
‘Do me a tiny review,’ I said then, to fill the aching pause. ‘Just – three hundred words or so.’
The faintest smile seemed to illuminate her face.
‘Could I?’ she said.
‘Of course you could,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say.
After work, I met MacDara in the gastro pub, now full of shouting people propping themselves up to drink Salice Salentino and dramatise the events of their working day. I had a headache. I wanted to go home, but MacDara was like a remnant of my old life, bearing arrows of freedom, little feathery tokens of liberation, and it seemed as though, when our conversations reached a certain burbling, overlapping pitch, we could throw everything down and go off white-water rafting, or propel ourselves from some mountain, cinema ad style, trailing plumes of snow as we span through a saturated blue sky. Lelia’s spirit was more home-bound.
‘Something stupid’s happening,’ he shouted into my ear, as we sat at a rickety table in the corner and bolted down salted almonds.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Get me a drink,’ he said. ‘I need a drink. It’s so bloody noisy in here.’
Obediently, I queued for drinks. Colleagues drifted up to the bar, and we leaned over for snatched conversations. It was interesting catching up with the news desk. The impression of Sylvie, sitting in this very room mere hours before, had disappeared: it seemed impossible that even her ghost presence had been here before it melted. Solid M
acDara, successful yet rebellious son of Italian-Scottish cafe workers, sat in her place, as substantial as she was subtle.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Tell me, then.’
‘You need a megaphone in this place to impart a bloody secret,’ he bellowed.
‘Shut up. Shout into my ear.’
‘I think I’m about to have an affair.’
‘No!’ I said. Horror, amazement and unexpected beads of delight bubbled through me in staggered sequence.
He said nothing. He looked slightly grim, his stubble-shadowed jaw set, as though he were a disappointed parent. I thought of Catrin sitting at their home, self-contained and womanly, with her smooth fair skin and her unruffled love for boisterous MacDara.
‘You’re not!’
‘I really think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how …’
‘Yes?’
‘How I can’t. Can not, I mean.’
‘God.’
He said nothing.
‘MacDara.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Who is it? It’s that – whatdyamacallit. That glammy old bitch you work with, isn’t it?’
‘Hell, no. That’s just a silly flirting thing. Nothing.’
‘And this one isn’t? Who is it, then?’
‘No one.’
‘Right. Thin air. No one. Who?’
He began to shake his head.
‘No one I know, you mean?’
He nodded.
‘How did you meet her?’
‘Oh Jesus, usual way, friend of a friend of a friend or something. Don’t ask me about her. If I don’t tell you, then you can’t accidentally tell Catrin.’
Sleep with Me Page 5
