She pushed and growled, the team now gathered round the end of her bed, as I encouraged her with the blaring rhythm of a coxswain, and then I saw a remarkable thing. A tiny head, a dark snaily scrawl of hair on a human scalp, flashed for a second into view and then disappeared again. It was a person, a living creature momentarily emerging between Lelia’s legs. The doctor put a sink plunger up her vagina; they cut her poor flesh in one brutal movement, blood blooming on the gaping wound; she pushed, and then the person descended again, slithering out with a pause at the shoulders, to a scream from Lelia and an efficient convergence by the medical staff – and it had a face; I was startled to the point of shock that it had a perfectly formed human face – and I leaned towards Lelia, who was panting with little gasps and suddenly smiling, and time was compressed as the doctors did something with towels and tubes over by the sink; and then there was another person in the room. A person was born. The person was tiny, and too early, but safe. I stared. I was unable to get over the fact that it had a face: it was not a bland, bald, featureless pink thing, but a wax-covered being with a face. It had felt-tip lines for brows and a wrinkled forehead and a tiny purple bud of a mouth and a slick swirled cap of hair and a little silken pumping pot-belly. Its face was so beautiful.
Lelia held her. She was a mother. Fuck, I thought. She seemed newly mature; a womanly creature subtly elevated above me, half-lost to me; an entity with powers I would always have to chase. And then there was a third person, no longer attached to either of us, who changed the room. She was a girl. I wept over her like a great male calf bellowing sobs that I couldn’t control: I wept at such indescribable beauty.
Twenty-Three
Richard
The Hindoo was to return to that city where the bells rang along the great river. She came in the night to visit me; she flowered now in front of me. I rested my brow on her cheek and I knew by then that a tender pink portion of her heart was mine. Her eyes were tilted desert stones that lit me as we whispered. All of our destiny, we said, we would share.
I never saw that little Hindoo again. She was returned, and I was sent away. I always prayed that I would meet her when we were ladies and had quite grown beyond the parents who had abandoned us, and then we would repair all of our sins. And if I could not have the Hindoo, I would be what she was and embrace her life in London, with its poets and its garden squares and its secrets. We would make a family, she and I.
I deleted the final email that Sylvie sent me. And gradually she became a myth in my mind, the embodiment of something urgent and secretive and past. Her name could only be hissed as bloody ammunition on tension-soaked nights when such betrayal seemed impossible to surmount, Lelia’s grief and fury so extreme that she stubbornly avoided discussion of her, and the unravelling of all treachery occurred in heated stabs and spurts over time. Sylvie was a half-buried subject dominated by the existence of someone else so much more pleasurable and new.
Our refusal to excuse each other’s infidelity was a point of pride. At heart we could not quite forgive one another, and our life together, however happy, would always contain those scars, those dull indices of maturity and experience that would flare, and recede, and then rear up again, freshly raw. My friendship with MacDara never recovered. We bumped into each other and muttered and growled on a couple of occasions, and I scorned him and missed him. Pathetically, I treasured the revelation that he’d never quite had his way with his MW, and I noted how jowly he was lately becoming, and how disconcertingly wealthy. Stronson was wary of me and was clearly nurturing a hangdog crush on a particularly nubile workie who had been set skivvying on the arts desk. The mysterious Charlie seemed to disappear after his love forsook him, the windows of the Endsleigh Street granny flat cheerfully lit and curtained by someone else on the times I looked up on my way to Euston.
Sylvie’s unacknowledged presence hovered round our home on Lelia’s more private and circumspect days, when I caught a certain softened expression in her, an abstracted gentleness distinct from the one our daughter inspired, and I wondered then with a stopped heart whether her mind was with her. Sometimes I felt miserable about Sylvie. In my regret for all I’d done to her, despite her treatment of Lelia, I wanted to be certain that she had some sort of divine protection. At other times, I wished I could punish her. And on rare occasions she came to me in the hours after midnight and I smelled her and I felt her narrow pale body in my memory and wanted her.
On tired mornings as the year progressed, when grizzling feeds had kept us awake at night, Lelia and I touched each other over our baby’s sleeping form as the newspapers arrived and the sun angled across the bed. She sometimes stretched to kiss me above her; she sometimes chided me, in her puritanical Lelia fashion, for lying in bed and wasting the day. The simple presence of Lelia and our baby as they lay there, their hair and eyes, the rhythm of their breathing, was remarkable to me, just as the newspapers, the taxis on the square, the rags of Lucy’s glottal stops floating from the area, were glorious and lovely and tightly woven into our history, into the miracle of the mundane. And gradually, Sylvie became less and less real. All that lived on was her uncomfortable shadow: the ghost of a ghost.
Twenty-Four
Richard
I caught sight of Sylvie Lavigne one afternoon the following spring in Paris. I was carrying our fat-cheeked daughter aloft beneath the limes in the Tuileries while Lelia read by the pool, and I glimpsed the back of her hair. I jolted, momentarily uncertain of whether it was Sylvie, but her hair’s movement as she walked cast the tiniest hooks to ruffle my skin.
Then I realised she was holding a baby. She settled the miniature creature on her shoulder, and I looked into its face as it bobbed, cocooned upon her. Its half-open eyes contained an instantly familiar expression. I caught my breath. The baby resembled my own daughter at birth: the sight of it sent me straight back to the first time I’d seen her, because all new babies look so very alike. I followed them with my gaze through the trees, and then I turned away and we left the park.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Oliver Bennett, Luigi Bonomi, Carol Briscoe, Frank Briscoe, Holly Briscoe, Claire Caiman, Edith Clarke, Eleanor Clarke, Ruth Corbett, Cecily d’Felice,Tony Dixon, Peter Grimsdale, Helen Healy, Julia Hobsbawm, Allegra Huston, Carol Jackson, Tara Kaufmann, Nicola Luckhurst, Fiona McMorrough, Charlotte Mendelson, Clementine Mendelson, Rachel Mendelson, Theodore Mendelson, Kate Saunders, Louisa Saunders, Gillian Stern, Becky Swift, Caroline Trettine, and especially to Jonny Geller, Alexandra Pringle and everyone at Bloomsbury.
A Note on the Author
JOANNA BRISCOE is the author of Mothers and Other Lovers, Skin and You. She has been a columnist for the Independent and the Guardian; she is currently a literary critic for the Guardian, and has contributed to all the major newspapers and magazines. She lives in London with her family.
Also available by Joanna Briscoe
You
Seventeen-year-old Cecilia is obsessed with her English teacher, the older, married Mr Dahl. She plots and speculates, yet she never dreams it could actually happen – but is it her imagination, or is the high-minded Mr Dahl responding to her? Her mother Dora, meanwhile, has preoccupations of her own. A move to Dartmoor was supposed to help reinvigorate her faltering marriage, but Dora soon finds herself increasingly drawn to the elegant, dangerously seductive, wife of Mr Dahl – Elisabeth. Twenty years later, Cecilia returns home to face her mother and her past. But the secrets they had thought were buried cannot be buried any longer.
‘Astounding’
Evening Standard
‘Dangerously addictive’
Maggie O’Farrell
‘A meditation on the lengths we will go to for love … Briscoe is brilliant at conveying the obsessiveness of teenage love, ratcheting up the tension until the reader is every bit as involved as the character … beguilingly good’
Observer
By the Same Author
Mothers and Other Lovers
Sk
in
You
First published in Great Britain 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Joanna Briscoe
This electronic edition published 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The right of Joanna Briscoe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
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You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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