by Adele Geras
Matt looked down at his plate. He finished what was left on it silently, trying to analyze his feelings. Part of him was interested in what Ellie was saying about his father. Why had she not mentioned it before? Perhaps she assumed he’d known all along, and didn’t take into account his father’s habitual silence and Constance’s lack of interest in anything that concerned her husband. Another part of him (and he felt ashamed admitting this to himself) was growing more and more irritated that this lunch had turned out to be more serious than the flirtatious and pleasant occasion he’d imagined. A voice in his head said did you truly expect her to initiate anything – anything romantic – at lunch? At La Belle Hélène, of all places? If so, you’re a bloody fool. She’s probably not interested. She’s probably only after free legal advice of some kind.
‘You’re not saying anything,’ Ellie chided him.
‘Sorry. I was thinking. I didn’t mean the whole meal to be devoted to my family history.’
‘Then,’ Ellie smiled at him, ‘let’s talk about something jollier.’
‘Jollier? You haven’t come to ask advice? Or talk about the will?’
‘No, whatever gave you that idea? I just fancied the idea of seeing you. Justin’s saying nothing and Nessa’s stopped moaning quite as much. What about Lou?’
‘She’s not said anything lately. I’m the one who’s still angry. The money, the property – either of those would have made such a difference to her situation.’
‘How are you liking life with a baby?’
‘It’s bloody hard work,’ Matt said, and at once felt disloyal. He added, ‘Though of course, we love having Poppy. She’s a sweetie, really.’
‘But your nights are interrupted and Phyl smells of baby vomit.’
‘You don’t mince your words, do you, Ellie? No, it’s fine, really.’
‘You always were,’ Ellie said, putting her hand gently over his and gazing into his eyes, ‘a useless liar. You’re hating it and wishing it was over and Lou would take her kid back. You can’t fool me.’
Matt felt himself blushing. ‘You’re a witch, Ellie. You see right through me. I can’t help it. I adore Poppy, but I think I’m a bit old for babies, that’s all. But Phyl’s happy. She loves it. Thrives on it.’
He felt her fingers caressing the skin of his wrist. ‘I think,’ she whispered, ‘that you might deserve a bit of a treat.’
‘What are you suggesting, Ellie?’
‘Nothing, really. Just the occasional lunch. We might do a movie or a play up in town?’
‘And what would I tell Phyl?’
‘You’d work something out.’
‘Get thee behind me, woman,’ he laughed, but his heart was pounding and he felt for the first time in a long time the excitement that came with the contemplation of a deliciously forbidden possibility. It could happen. Ellie was willing to sleep with him, he knew, but he wasn’t – he couldn’t! What would it do to Phyl if she found out? She needn’t find out. No one need ever know. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t cut out to be an adulterer. As Ellie said, he was a rotten liar. He sighed and said, ‘Though I wouldn’t rule out another lunch.’
‘Soon,’ Ellie said. ‘Can it be soon? It’s such a treat to see you, Matt. Sometimes I wonder why I ever left you.’
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Mrs Blandford and Mrs Whitford were no longer at their table. When had they left? He’d been too preoccupied to notice. Would that become part of the anecdote the two ladies would spread around town? My dear, he was so absorbed in this woman that he didn’t even look up when we passed their table.
Ellie signalled the waiter and asked for the dessert menu. The tables were small at this restaurant. He was aware that her knees were almost touching his under the hanging whiteness of the tablecloth. He could put a hand on her knee. She was wearing a shortish skirt … he could move his fingers gently under the hem and … He shook his head to clear it of the knowledge that Ellie always wore stockings and not tights. He closed his eyes briefly, remembering, so vividly remembering, how soft the white skin was at the top of her thighs …
‘Are you having a pudding?’ Ellie’s voice brought him back to the real world, where he was a respectable lawyer married to another woman, having a perfectly decent lunch with someone he was supposed to have got over two decades ago.
‘No … no, thanks. Just a strong black coffee, that’s all.’
He hoped devoutly that the caffeine would knock some sense into him. He felt inflamed, feverish, and found himself trying to answer two completely contradictory questions. The first was where can I get Ellie on her own and how soon? and the second, how do I run away from this ghastly temptation and avoid wrecking my life with Phyl? There was no way he knew to reconcile these conflicting desires but he was certain of one thing: whatever Ellie wanted from him and was willing to give him, it wasn’t any kind of permanent relationship. I don’t care, he thought. I want her. I wish – I wish I could take her back to the office, to the comfortable chair she was sitting in an hour ago. I’d push her skirt up above her knees and …
‘Your coffee, sir,’ said the waiter.
5
We apologize for the delay, which has been caused by a signal failure …
The tinny voice burbled on for a while, explaining, and saying sorry in every tinny way it knew, but the bottom line was a delay. Damn and blast and bloody hell, Lou thought, staring out of the window at a bank of more than usual boringness. Just grass, and those purple flowering plants she didn’t know the name of but which weren’t buddleia and which grew in profusion by every railway line in the country, or so it seemed. She took out her mobile and phoned Haywards Heath to tell them she was going to be late.
‘It’s okay,’ said her mother. ‘Just phone when you’re nearly here and Poppy and I will come and fetch you in the car.’
Poppy. She’d only been away from home for a couple of weeks but even so, when it got to this stage, when she was actually on her way to see her daughter, she could hardly wait. I’m going to tell Mum, she told herself. I’m going to tell her that I’m taking Poppy back as soon as I’ve finished this screenplay. Lou had come to the conclusion that in spite of the convenience of solitude; in spite of the fact that she could do exactly what she wanted when she wanted; in spite of the hours and hours of work she’d managed to put in while Poppy wasn’t there, she wanted her back. She wanted her there in the next room. Her voice. Her silly words, her cries, her smell, and the smile that she produced every day when Lou went in to pick her up out of her cot: shining, pure, totally loving – and all for her. The little arms stretched out, the pink and white striped fleecy bag that she slept in twisted up around her feet, hobbling her – I miss all that, Lou acknowledged. And I’m jealous of Mum and worried that if I leave Poppy there, she’ll get to love Mum better than she loves me. It’s not enough that she loves me. Lou recognized that these feelings were stupid and petty but still, it was true. She needed Poppy to love her best. I love you all there is – that’s what her own mother used to say to her when she was a child and Lou had always remembered it. Now Phyl was saying it to Poppy. Do I mind that? Am I jealous of my own daughter? That is beyond stupid. It’s ridiculous. I’m going to stop thinking such nonsense right now.
The train remained at a standstill. Passengers were becoming restless, getting up and going to the loo, peering out of the windows, and there was a lot of sighing from the overweight woman opposite her, who looked as though she might be on the point of starting a conversation. No way, Lou thought, and scrabbled round in her bag for Blind Moon, which she took everywhere with her. She’d covered it, primary school style, with an off cut of wallpaper to preserve the original dust-jacket. The book fell open at a passage which Lou had read so often that she knew it almost by heart:
There were always screams at night and he often slept through them, so he didn’t know why these screams were different. Why they’d woken him up. Peter lay in the darkness, and the sound went through him, making his s
kin crawl. He sat up. Everyone in the hut was lying quite still and he thought: Some of them might be dead and we won’t know till the morning. Probably, though, they were just sleeping. It was easy to think bad thoughts in the night. That’s what Dulcie called them, bad thoughts. Things that came into your mind at night which made you cry, or frightened you. Things you remembered when you lay down which you didn’t have time to remember when the sun was shining. Like what they’d done to Mrs Atkins. They made her stand in the sun and didn’t allow anyone to come near her. For hours. She fell over in the end and he hadn’t seen her since. She was dead, most likely. She’d tried to escape and they didn’t like that. There were lots of things they didn’t like but the worst punishments were for trying to get away, over the barbed wire looped in thorny curls over the top of the fence.
The screams had got a bit quieter now. Suddenly, he knew. He knew who was screaming. When you scream, you don’t really have a voice and yet he recognized the sounds. His mother was making them. She was screaming.
‘What’s the matter? Why’re you sitting up?’ That was Derek, who slept in the next bed. Derek was a mummy’s boy and Peter didn’t like him much, but he said, ‘It’s my mother. Can you hear the screams? It’s her. I know it is. I’m going to the women’s hut.’
‘You can’t. They’ll find out.’
‘Shut up and go to sleep. Don’t say a word or you’ll be sorry.’
Peter made his way from shadow to shadow across the compound. A thin moon in the sky made small patches of light on the earth and he followed the screams to the women’s hut and crept up the steps. He paused on the second one, because he could see in from there, right across the floor to where his mother was lying. He could see the women, gathered round the dirty mattress on the floor. Peter didn’t know what to do. The screams were getting worse now. Mummy must be ill, he thought. Why don’t the guards come? They should bring a doctor – there must be someone who could help. And then quite suddenly, Peter realized what was happening and wondered why it had taken him so long. He was as stupid and babyish as Derek. She was having a baby. The baby was coming. If he said something, would they send him away? He decided to keep quite silent and tiptoed into a shadow in a corner of the hut where no one would see him. No one noticed. They were all, all the women, paying attention to nothing but his mother’s pain.
Later, Peter wished that he’d run back to the children’s hut before he’d seen what happened. His mother was being torn apart; that was what it looked like. There was so much blood. His mother’s legs were streaked with it; it pooled in a dark puddle on the floor. And the screams had stopped and she was sobbing and then there was another sound, coming from a thing that looked like a skinned animal. A rabbit or something very small. How could such a small thing open up a scarlet gash in his mother’s body and leave her splashed with sticky blood? The skinned creature was screaming very small screams. It was lying on his mother and she had her bosoms out and Peter felt embarrassed and wanted to run away and cry and never see a thing like that again. It was horrible. His mother was broken. Split open. Horrible horrible horrible.
By the time she looked up, the train was moving again and the woman opposite had given her up as a bad job and gone to sleep. It wouldn’t be long till she was there, with Poppy, with her parents. Her thoughts turned to her screenplay … this scene was very vivid in her mind. She could see the darkness, hear the voices, those screams. And no words. Or not many. She’d decided on a voice-over for some parts of the story. Voice-overs weren’t fashionable but she didn’t care. This story needed one. So much of it was Peter’s own thoughts, and it would be a shame to lose too many of his words.
When the train stopped, Lou was the first to leave the carriage. She almost ran to the carpark, where she knew Phyl would be waiting. She saw her at once, standing by the car with Poppy in her arms.
‘Baby! Darling Poppykins baby …’ She took the child from Phyl and clasped her close, aware of her solidity, her plump pink cheeks, the chubby little hands patting and patting her as if Poppy were making sure that yes, this was Mummy. There were tears in Lou’s eyes as she felt herself overwhelmed with a tangle of feelings: pleasure that her baby hadn’t forgotten who she was since last week; guilt that she’d been away from her for so many hours and gratitude for her health; for the fact that she wasn’t the baby in Grandad’s book – the skinned creature, the rabbit, the newborn who was so thin and tiny that there wasn’t ever a chance of her surviving … ‘Come along, Pumpkin,’ she said, ‘get back into your car seat. Granny’s going to drive us to her house and then we’ll all have tea and cake, won’t we, Granny?’
‘You certainly will. Poppy helped me to stir it, didn’t you, darling?’
‘Ummy!’ Poppy pronounced and started to wriggle as Phyl strapped her into the seat. ‘Ummy yap!’
‘You can sit on Mummy’s lap when we get home,’ Phyl said. ‘Now you’ve got to sit in your car seat like a good girl.’
‘I’ll sit next to you,’ said Lou, and slid into the seat next to Poppy, suddenly remembering the night she was born. The pain – had she screamed? Maybe she had, but her screams had been sanitized, made safe in the white and silver hi-tech labour ward of the hospital. Then they’d given her an anaesthetic and taken her in for a C-section. Poppy had been beautiful right from the start, staring into Lou’s eyes with a gaze that everyone said was quite unusual. Most babies, they said, don’t focus for ages but, in the words of one of the midwives, ‘This one’s been here before.’ This baby’s skin had been pale and unwrinkled from the moment she first drew breath and she’d managed, unusually, to look like neither Winston Churchill nor Queen Victoria.
‘What’s the news, darling? Had a good week?’ said Phyl, over her shoulder.
‘I went out to dinner with Harry on Thursday.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, God, Mum, stop it. It’s not like that. We were discussing a work thing, and he took me for a curry, that’s all.’
‘Is it? Is it all?’
Lou recognized the yearning in her mother’s voice. She was always on the lookout for romance in her daughter’s life. She’d have adored putting a big wedding together.
‘Yup. Forget it, Mum. No wedding alert yet.’
Phyl sighed. ‘I live in hope.’
‘Iven ope, iven ope, iven ope,’ sang Poppy, now gurgling away in her car seat.
‘She’s really getting the hang of this speaking lark,’ said Lou. ‘But let’s sing a song now, okay?’
She began to sing ‘This Old Man’, which was near the top of Poppy’s hit parade. By the time they’d reached ‘He plays five’ the baby’s eyes were closed, and her mouth was half open. Lou wanted to kiss her but also didn’t want to wake her up. A spasm of love so strong that it was almost like a pain in her heart took hold of her and she, too, closed her eyes, willing herself not to cry.
*
Gareth was nuzzling her neck, murmuring endearments, moving on top of her in a way that Nessa had come to know so well that she could respond without really engaging her brain. But on this occasion it occurred to her to wonder, with a spasm of disgust, how long it had been since he’d been doing exactly this with Melanie. She tried to think of something far removed from sex: the deal Justin was going to strike with the spa people; how that might benefit her, and Paper Roses; how Tamsin needed new gym shoes and new T-shirts and knickers, too. She seemed to be growing very fast lately and Nessa mentally went through her diary for the next few days wondering when they could fit in a visit to M&S. Gareth was nearly done. She could tell from the way he sounded, his breathing working up to its usual rather gurgly gasping shout. She made a few noises herself to show willing, and sure enough, a few seconds later it was all over. Her husband lay beside her, panting after his exertions.
‘Mmm,’ said Nessa. ‘Lovely, darling.’ It was what she always said. Gareth usually answered with something along the lines of, ‘Yes, darling – lovely,’ and by then the snoring was only seconds away. She got
out of bed to go to the bathroom. He’d be fast asleep by the time she got back.
‘Darling?’ When she got back, he wasn’t snoring. He was propped up against his pillows and he’d turned his bedside light on and was looking at her oddly. Nessa frowned. ‘What’s the matter, Gareth? D’you want a cup of tea or something?’
‘No, it’s okay. I just wanted … Well, I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Fine,’ Nessa said. She was uncertain where to put herself. She wasn’t quite sure what was going on but didn’t feel like sliding between the sheets to lie next to her husband. He was looking uncharacteristically serious. If there was one quality about Gareth that she liked it was his carefree unconcern about most things, and the shambling, rather sweet way he bumbled through life, not fretting, not going into dark moods, not sulking for the most part. She had to admit that he was easy-going, and there was a lot to be said for being married to someone like that, especially if you were exactly the opposite. Because Nessa took everything so seriously and privately admitted that she was very quick to take offence and stalk off in a huff, she found it restful to be with someone who was even-tempered most of the time. He was going to confess about Melanie, she felt sure.
‘Go on, then,’ she said, standing up again. She walked round to the chaise longue, which was pushed up next to the wall on his side and sat down facing him. She couldn’t, even on the edge of what looked like being a confession of adultery, stop herself from stroking the fabric in which she’d upholstered this piece of furniture: a luscious, apricot velvet. Gorgeous. The right decision, she told herself. It looked so good with the bronze silk curtains. She felt a small flutter of self-satisfaction.
‘I don’t know how to say it, Nessa. I’m not good at stuff like this.’
Nessa tried to look concerned but she wasn’t going to rescue him with helpful questioning. He’d get there in the end.
