by Rosie Thomas
‘The news sounded all right this morning,’ she ventured.
‘It was, to begin with. I’d started to make plans. You know, in a month, taking him home. Not expecting too much, just finding out what he could or couldn’t do. Then they came to tell me that there was a problem with his breathing. They’re ventilating him because his lungs don’t want to work. Then they said there was something wrong with his kidneys. There’s a blockage in his intestine. They’re watching him now, to see if they can operate to clear it.’
‘It all happened as quickly as that?’
‘He’s very small. They can … they can deteriorate very quickly. But he’s much bigger than some of the babies in there. If he can survive the operation, and it’s successful, he may still be all right.’
They saw the equal and opposite currents of hope and fear in her, and understood some of the tension that made her arms and fingers seem stiff.
‘The doctor said not, not to be too hopeful yet. One day, even one hour is critical.’
Harriet and Jane said what they could, making little more than small, soothing sounds. They sat quietly for a moment or two when they had come to the end even of that, listening to the hospital noises. There was the metallic rattle of big trolleys, and a smell of boiled vegetables. Early institutional supper was on its way.
‘Do you want us to go, Jenny?’ Harriet asked gently.
‘Stay just for five more minutes.’ Jenny wearily closed her eyes.
‘Where’s Charlie?’ Jane half-mouthed, half-whispered to Harriet.
But Jenny answered, ‘His editor wanted him to go and do some story. I told him to go, there’s nothing for him to do here. I wish I could do something, other than just lie here. If I could do anything, anything in the world to make him live, I’d do it.’
They waited, holding on to one another, saying nothing.
Harriet didn’t know how long it was before a doctor came in in his white coat. All three of them stared frozenly at him.
‘Mrs Thimbell, if I could just have a quick word?’
Harriet and Jane bundled themselves into the corridor. They leaned against the green-painted wall, listening to the sound of babies crying. The doctor came out again, his hands in the pocket of his coat. He nodded encouragingly at them and swept away.
Jenny’s arms stuck out even more stiffly. She told them, ‘They’re going to operate to clear the blockage this evening. They can’t tell me anything else until it’s been done. Will you wait until Charlie comes? He said he’d be here at seven.’
They sat down again on either side of the bed. They tried to talk, but the words tailed off into silence again, and Jenny seemed to prefer that. Jane spoke once, in a low, ferocious voice. ‘Come on, James Jonathan. Come on.’
Charlie came.
He was normally a noisy, red-faced man who was fond of beer and gossip. He used the saloon-bar manner as a cover for his sharp intelligence. But there was no noise tonight.
He sat down and put his arms around his wife, resting his head against her pillows. After a moment, Jane and Harriet crept away.
In the street outside Jane said, ‘Let’s go and have a drink. I really do need to have a drink. Poor Jenny, the poor love.’
There was a wine bar on the corner, one of the green paint, wicker furniture and weeping greenery variety. They ordered wine without deliberation, and sat down at one of the wicker tables.
There seemed little to say that would not be a pointless reiteration of anxiety. Harriet watched people arriving, greeting each other. They all seemed to make tidy couples.
‘What’s up?’ Jane demanded. ‘It’s not just this, is it?’
Harriet shook her head. ‘But this makes it seem not particularly tragic. Not even particularly significant. I was thinking that, when we were sitting in there with Jenny.’
‘What, Harriet?’
‘Leo.’
Harriet described what had happened. Jane’s thick, fair eyebrows drew together sharply. She had never been particularly fond of Leo, but she was always scrupulously fair.
Fairness made her ask, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure? I suppose he might have been doing some calendar shots, and I suppose he might have taken his own clothes off to keep the model company. But then he would have needed a camera, wouldn’t he, and a couple of lights? No, it’s not funny, I know. He admitted it, anyway. It wasn’t the first time, or even the first girl. It’s been going on for quite a long time.’ Harriet paused for a moment and then added, ‘If I was being honest, I suppose I’d have to say that I half-knew. Only I didn’t want to know, so I closed it off.’
Jane took a mouthful of wine. ‘So what happens?’
‘I’m going to leave him.’
‘Isn’t that a bit precipitate? You’ve been together for a long time. You’re Leo-and-Harriet, aren’t you? Can’t you work it out, build on what you’ve got, or whatever it is the advice columns tell you to do?’
Harriet had been thinking about Jenny and Charlie, and wondering how their marriage would survive a handicapped baby, or the death of James Jonathan. A little absently she answered, ‘I don’t think any of us can see into each other’s marriages.’
‘No. Especially if you’re not married at all, like me.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
Jane’s expression softened. ‘I know you didn’t. Don’t be stupid. I just wanted to say something obvious like, Don’t be proud and hasty, or Give each other another chance.’
Deliberately Harriet told her, ‘No. There isn’t anything to work out or build on, you see. I’m quite sure it’s over, and it would only be weakness to try to hang on. Leo’s kind of weakness, what’s more. There would be more mess, and subterfuge, and undermining one another. I would rather be hard about it now, and then start to get over it.’
‘Yes. That’s you.’
‘Don’t you agree with me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what people promise when they marry each other. I do imagine promises aren’t so easily undone.’
But they are, Harriet thought miserably. They are undone, and without love or affection there is no reason for them anyway. It would be different if we had children. Had had. She didn’t say that, remembering where they had just been, and remembering that Jane wanted a baby, and could never find anyone to father it for her. She took refuge in asperity.
‘I don’t know why you’re defending Leo’s sordid behaviour.’
‘I’m not. You know what I think about Leo. I’m just trying to see both sides.’
‘And that’s you.’
That made them both laugh, a little bubble of welcome laughter that grew out of tension. They leaned together so that their shoulders touched.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘He’s away until the day after tomorrow. I think I’ll go home, for a little while. I’d like to tell Kath, as gently as I can. She thinks Leo’s as perfect as Averil does. Well, no, not quite as perfect. That would be impossible.’
They laughed again. Jane knew Harriet’s mother-in-law.
‘Then I’ll look around for somewhere to rent. I suppose, in the end, I’ll get half the proceeds of our flat. I haven’t thought about it very clearly yet. I’m only sure that we can’t be Leo-and-Harriet any more. It will be a relief just to be Harriet.’
Jane looked soberly at her. ‘All right. You know you can come and stay with me for as long as you want, don’t you?’
Jane had her own tiny house in Hackney, a welcoming place that was often full of people.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said, meaning it.
Jane sat back in her chair. ‘I wonder what’s happening across there.’
‘Helplessness makes it worse. Think how it must be for Jenny and Charlie.’
They stayed at their table in the wine bar, finishing their bottle of wine without relish, and talking sombrely. It was hard to think for long about anything except the baby and what his tiny body must have to undergo.
At
last they paid their bill and went out into the warm night. Neither of them felt that they could eat anything; Harriet was reluctant to go back to the new strangeness of her home, but she knew that she must begin to be on her own so that it could become familiar. She had no choice.
They walked a little way together, then paused at the point where they had met earlier.
‘Are you sure you won’t come back with me to Hackney?’ Jane asked.
‘No, but thank you. I’ll take you up on your offer another time.’
‘Good-night, then.’ They held on to each other for a minute. Jane’s cheek was very warm, and soft.
‘Talk to you tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow.’
Harriet went back to the flat that wasn’t home any longer. She walked through the rooms once again, touching possessions that had been Leo-and-Harriet’s, thinking.
At five minutes to midnight the telephone rang, only once because she snatched it up.
Charlie told her that James Jonathan had survived the operation, and had been returned to the special care unit, but then his heart had stopped beating. The paediatricians and the nurses had restarted it once, but the rhythm had slowed, and grown irregular, and last it had faded away.
‘Jenny was holding him when it stopped.’
Charlie was crying. Harriet’s tears rolled down her face.
‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I’m so sorry.’
James Jonathan’s life had lasted just a little more than two days.
Harriet went into her bedroom, lay down in the darkness, and cried for him.
Three
When she set out for Sunderland Avenue, for her mother’s house, Harriet didn’t take her car. It was parked outside the flat and the keys were in her bag, but she didn’t even glance at its shiny curves as she passed. She walked to the end of the road, turned right and went on, away from the river and towards the tube station.
In the early days of her independence, before the onset of Leo and the flat and the car. Harriet had always gone home by tube to see Kath. Her mother and stepfather lived on the southern fringe of London, where the narrow streets of terraced houses gave way to the broader, suburban avenues and closes. It was an awkward, boring journey, involving two changes and then a bus ride from the tube station, but it seemed fitting to do it this way, today.
Harriet smiled faintly as she negotiated the local street market, skirting the stalls piled up with cauliflowers and Indian cotton shirts and cheap cassettes.
Going home to mother? she taunted herself, experimentally.
But it wasn’t that. She was close to Kath, and she felt the need to explain to her what had happened. She was going home to do that, as if to a friend.
Harriet came out at the other side of the market and saw the tube station ahead on the corner. The pavement outside the entrance was smeared with the pulp of rotten oranges, and littered with vegetable stalks and hamburger cartons. A handful of post-punks and market traders’ boys were lounging against some railings. They inspected her as she passed. Harriet had begun to think of herself as too old and too married to be a target for street-corner whistles, but now she reminded herself that she was not quite thirty, and that she was no longer quite married.
She caught the eye of one of the market boys. He stuck out his lower jaw and whistled through his teeth.
‘Ullo, darlin’! Can I come wiv yer?’
It wasn’t much of a tribute, but it heartened her. She smiled, more warmly than was necessary, and shook her head.
‘Aw right, I’ll wait for yer!’ he shouted after her.
Harriet went on through the shiny mouth of the ticket hall and the dense, fuggy tube smell closed around her. She pressed her money into the ticket machine and moved through the barrier in a sea of Saturday morning shoppers. The escalator swept her downwards, making her one of an unending ribbon of descending heads like intricate skittles. The train was crowded. Harriet squeezed in with a press of bodies, and reached up to a pendant knob. A newspaper was folded in her bag, but she could not twist around to reach it, let alone open it to read. Instead she studied the passengers around her.
A young black couple sat immediately beneath her elbow, with a small girl perched on her father’s lap. The child’s hair was twisted into springy pigtails and she wore a spotless white ruched dress. The child beamed up at Harriet and Harriet smiled back at her. The young parents nodded, conscious and proud.
The smile lingered on Harriet’s face as she looked beyond. Standing next to her were three teenage girls, going up west to spend their week’s wages on clothes. Beyond them was a fat man in overalls, two boys with headsets clamped over their ears were hunched next to him. There were old ladies, tourists in raincoats, foreign students, wax-faced middle-aged men, all wedged together, patiently perspiring.
Harriet didn’t mind being a part of this pungent mass, even felt affection for it. She thought of it as a slice of the city itself, pushed underground, with herself as a crumb of it.
When she changed trains the crowd thinned. She was travelling against the tide of Saturday shoppers and there were plenty of empty seats. Still Harriet didn’t unfold her newspaper. She stared through the window opposite at the unending runs of pipework, thinking.
At the end of the line she was almost the only passenger left on the train. She ran up the littered steps, through the various layers of station smells, and boarded a bus outside. Harriet climbed to the top deck. She had always ridden upstairs with Kath, when Lisa was a baby, enjoying the vistas and the glimpses into lives behind first-floor windows.
It was a short ride to Sunderland Avenue. Harriet had long ago decided that somewhere in the course of it came the dividing line between London, proper London, and its dimmer, politer suburbs. Shopping streets gave way to long rows of houses fanning away from the main road. There were steep hills, lending the impression that woods and green fields might be glimpsed, in the distance, from the top of the bus. Harriet knew quite well that there never was anything to be seen, even on the clearest day, but the spread of more streets, winding up and down the hills.
The bus stopped at the end of Sunderland Avenue, and there was a steep climb from there to her mother’s house. Harriet walked briskly under the avenue trees, past front gardens full of asters and dahlias and late roses. They were big, detached houses built in the Thirties, and their owner-occupiers took pride in them. It was a neighbourhood of conservatory extensions and new tile roofs and house names on slate plaques or slices of rustic log or spelt out in twisted metal.
The house belonging to Kath and her husband, facing Harriet on a bend at the hilltop, had the look of being even better-tended than the rest. The original windows had been replaced by bigger, steel-framed ones. There was a glassed-in room that Ken called a storm lobby enclosing the front door, a rockery beside the front path and new garden walls of yellowish reconstituted stone. A big pair of wrought-iron gates across the short driveway were painted baby-blue.
Ken owned a small engineering company, with a sub-division specialising in domestic central heating. ‘My house is as much an advert for my business as my offices, I always say,’ Ken was fond of remarking.
‘You do always say,’ Harriet would agree, earning a sharp look from Kath and a titter from Lisa. But Ken would only ever nod with satisfaction, as if she had simply agreed with him. He was a kind man and fond of his stepdaughter.
Before Harriet even reached the glass door of the porch, Kath appeared amongst her begonias that sheltered there from any storms that might sweep across south London.
‘Harriet! You never said that you’d be coming.’
‘I took a chance that you’d be in.’ Equally, she had taken a chance that her half-sister would be out and that Ken would be working.
‘Well, if only you’d rung. Lisa’s at Karen’s, and Ken’s on a job.’
‘Never mind.’ Harriet kissed her mother, then took her arm. ‘We can have an hour to ourselves.’ Thinking of what she would have to say in the hour sh
e added, too brightly, ‘The garden’s looking lovely.’
Kath peered over her shoulder. ‘But where’s your car, love?’
‘I left it at … home. Came on the tube.’
Kath looked horrified. ‘It’s not broken down already, is it?’ Harriet knew that her mother was proud of her in her smart hatchback, proud of the shop and of Leo whose name appeared alongside photographs in glossy magazines.
‘I just wanted to come the old way.’
‘Well, what a nuisance for you,’ Kath commiserated, as if conceiving such an odd notion could only be an inconvenience.
They went into the house together, passed through to the kitchen at the back. It was a big room looking through sliding doors on to a terrace and the garden beyond. There were quarry tiles and expanses of pine units with white laminate work-tops, rows of flowered cereal and biscuit jars, a radio playing morning music. Kath spooned coffee powder into floral mugs, flicked the switch of the kettle, and embarked on a piece of news about Lisa’s latest boyfriend. Harriet stood by the patio doors, half-turned to the garden, looking up the slope of the lawn to the spreading tree of heaven at the end. She listened carefully to the story, putting in the right responses, but Kath broke off midway.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’
Sometimes she surprised Harriet with her shrewdness. Harriet supposed that she didn’t give her mother’s insight sufficient reckoning.
‘Jenny lost her baby. He lived for two days, he died last night.’
She was ashamed of her means of prevarication, putting Jenny’s tragedy to Kath at one remove, instead of admitting to her own.
Kath’s face reflected her feelings. She knew Jenny only slightly, but her concern was genuine.
‘The poor thing. Poor little thing.’
Harriet told her what had happened. They drank their coffee, leaning soberly against the pine cupboards.
