When she was dressed again, she made herself a sandwich and sat at the kitchen table to eat. She could do with a cup of coffee now, but the smell of charred beans was off-putting and she couldn’t remember where she’d put the old cafetière. She couldn’t, for the moment, think what she’d normally do with this time, either. It was as though she’d been set back into an unfamiliar place after the canal incident, after seeing James. Here she was in this big house, all grown up: what now?
Their plain Victorian terrace had been thoroughly extended over the years: this was, in estate-agent speak, a desirable side street where the properties weren’t quite big enough for modern ideas of what a family house should be. Loft conversions and rear extensions were de rigeur, back gardens gradually encroached upon by the designs of ingenious architects. Their own kitchen had been tackled by the previous owners, with plenty of glass to let in light and exploit the view of the garden, the apple trees and ragged flowerbeds and the lawn reduced to wasteland by four boys and their ball games.
A big garden, though, for a town house. And an elegant house, too: high ceilings and broad floors, a sense of space. In an arch above the kitchen lintel a semicircle of stained glass, blue and amber and watery purple, offered a hint of Oxford’s Victorian Gothic phase. A privileged life, Olivia acknowledged that, with nothing worse to face for the rest of the day than her afternoon piano pupils. There was much to be grateful for.
She got up from the table and looked out at the collage of green and auburn, caught on the cusp between summer and autumn. And then a flash of white: the conspicuous progress of the cat, stalking sparrows or squirrels. Olivia unlocked the back door and called him. He had more names, this cat, than anyone could remember. Somehow he’d managed to persuade each of the family that they were special, acknowledging their particular pet-name with a tilt of his expressive chin. He contemplated Olivia now with a haughty pretence at coincidence, then he picked his way neatly, unhurried, over the moth-eaten grass towards her.
Olivia scooped him up and buried her face in his fur, and her head filled with his thrum of contentment. She envied the simplicity of his pleasure, the unrestrained hedonism that somehow didn’t diminish his dignity. Sensualist, she crooned. How can you pretend to be a hunter? He’d been a consolation prize, the cat; acquired, like the new bike, when Benjy went to school. She was lucky, Olivia thought, that he was minded to keep her company during the long days when the house was empty.
But in a few hours her boys would be home, populating the place with their noise and their clutter. Making sense of it, Olivia thought – and making sense of their mother, too. Every afternoon she drew the bustle about her, feeling its reassuring weight on her shoulders, a cloak embroidered with the story of her life as wife and mother. She was conscious, suddenly, that this was what people saw of her, this robe of office, the outward and visible signs of her growing children. Growing so quickly, too; faster and faster as they got the hang of it. Boys becoming men already. She held the cat tighter, aware of his limbs tensing, ready to wriggle free. She carried him across to the cupboard where his food was kept and felt him relax again, heavy in her arms like the after-effects of the brandy. Precious boy, she whispered, half-aloud. Indulge me a little longer.
Tom, her eldest, was almost the age she’d been when she last saw James. More years had passed since that summer than any of them had lived before it. Time and its curious juxtapositions spun in her head like a whirligig. If she shut her eyes she could be back in her nineteen-year-old self, not knowing what was to come: marriage, children. Tom, Alistair, Angus, Benjy.
She released the cat with a little sigh. He landed elegantly, shook his coat out and paced over to the bowl of food Olivia had filled for him. For a moment she watched him eat, then her gaze drifted back to the garden. Through the window she could see squirrels scuttling along the fence and hear the faint sounds of children next door. The first scattering of leaves lay below the horse chestnut, patterning the scrubby grass with their splayed fingers.
So this was a normal life, Olivia thought, the life she’d ended up with. A quiet kitchen in the middle of the day; the nagging sense that she hadn’t done as much as she might, settling for teaching the piano and bringing up her children in comfortable North Oxford. Did that meet the requirements of whatever inquisitor she had invoked? Did it answer the questions the morning’s drama had posed?
Out in the garden something stirred: a fall of light through the trees; the weight of the sun at the end of a shortening day.
Chapter 5
1983
“You did the best you could,” the nurse said. She looked weary and disheartened, as though she wasn’t quite inured to death; especially not to the death of a baby.
Olivia and Eve had been put in a waiting room with no windows and a sign on the door that said ‘Relatives Room.’ Despite the comfortable sofas and the fresh flowers on the table it had a surreal, anaesthetic quality. Olivia could only think in clichés: I feel numb; I can’t believe this is happening. She tried to imagine being told that someone really connected to her had died.
“She must have been lying there for a long time when you found her,” the nurse went on. “She was cold, and she’d lost a lot of blood because the umbilical cord hadn’t been properly clipped off. And she hadn’t been fed, so her blood sugar level was very low.”
Olivia nodded stupidly. She could tell the language was being simplified for her, but that didn’t make it any easier to understand.
“She’d had a bump on the head, too. Perhaps she’d been dropped on the floor where you found her.” The nurse paused for a moment, as though waiting for corroboration.
“It was concrete, the floor of the phone box,” Eve said. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d arrived at the hospital.
The nurse put her arms around Olivia then, knowing she was going to cry. “If you hadn’t found her she might have died without ever being cuddled,” she said.
They let Olivia look at the tiny body once more, dressed in a white gown and laid out in a little cot not much bigger than a shoebox. She looked different already, a carved effigy rather than the baby she’d carried out of the phone box. Her features were hardly there any more, mere suggestions of human characteristics.
Olivia could feel Eve’s dispassionate medical student gaze directed at her back as she stared down at the baby. In the background Eve and the nurse were talking quietly, the nurse offering technical details, professional to professional. Olivia couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying, but the words floated through her head all the same: she could already imagine Eve repeating them to James later. Hypothermia. Hypoglycaemia. Hypovolaemia. Infusion, intubation, infarct. Too many words, she thought. But any words would be too many for her, just now.
Eve’s voice was flat when she spoke to Olivia again.
“We’ve got to talk to them.”
“Who?”
“The Consultant, to start with. Maybe the police.”
Olivia stared at her.
“It’s all right.” The nurse smiled, moving back to Olivia’s side. The weary look had gone: there was authority in her eyes now, confidence in her role. “There’s nothing to worry about. They have to be satisfied it’s not your baby. They need as many details as possible so they can try to trace the mother.”
“Of course.” Eve smiled, the brave witness. The reliable witness, with her medical knowledge. “We quite understand.”
Eve had phoned James from the hospital, and when she and Olivia got back to Shearwater House at last he had supper ready for them, a bottle of wine open. They had driven all the way from Ipswich in silence. Olivia couldn’t tell whether Eve was exasperated still, or regretting her bad temper; later, she realised she’d just been working out what to say to James.
“I say,” was what Eve said when they walked in, her voice a squeaky imitation of insouciance. “It’s the Galloping Gourmet in person. How sweet of you to go to so much trouble.” She touched his arm lightly,
a gesture none of them missed, then moved over to the stove and lifted the lid of the casserole. A rich scent of herbs and garlic filled the kitchen.
“No trouble,” James said. “It sounds as though you’ve had a rough afternoon.”
He looked at Olivia, and she tried to smile. Although she could see him there, could feel grateful for his kindness, the world he was part of didn’t seem quite real any more. She felt the ground dissolving, a seasick shifting beneath her feet.
“Have a seat.” James pulled out a chair. “A glass of wine might do you good.”
Eve picked up the bottle. “Chianti. Delicious. Shall I lay the table?”
Things went on in the same way through supper. James dished up spaghetti bolognese, and while they ate it Eve told him the story of how they’d got lost in the country lanes as though it was funny; as though the row that had sent the two of them out of the door ten hours before had never happened. She moved on to the discovery of the baby with barely a break in tone. Olivia could hear her casting herself as the knowledgeable medic again, seeking James’s approval as she fleshed out the story she’d told him on the phone.
“We thought they were going to keep us at the hospital forever,” Eve said. “Didn’t we, Olivia? We might have to come back for the inquest, if the Coroner wants us there. But they have to try and find the mother first.”
Olivia tried to speak, once or twice, but the effort was too great. She could only see the world through a veil; as if she was swathed in amniotic membranes, perhaps, still tethered to the ghost of that dangling cord. Everything seemed strangely coloured, incredible, illusory. Had there really been a baby? Had she really believed she could keep it alive?
When she’d finished eating she pushed back her chair, walked to the downstairs lavatory and vomited up everything in her stomach. Neither James nor Eve said anything when she came back.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. “Sorry. I feel shattered.”
“Poor Olivia,” said Eve. When the door had shut behind her, Olivia heard Eve speaking again. “She held the baby all the way up the A12. It must have died in her arms.”
Olivia was woken by a tap on her bedroom door.
“Eve?” she whispered.
The door clicked open.
“It’s James. Eve’s gone to bed. I came to make sure you were okay.”
“I’ve been asleep.”
“Good. Feeling any better?”
“A bit.”
“Feeling like something to eat?”
“What time is it?”
“Late. Don’t move, I’ll bring something up. You’ll be better off with some food inside you.”
Olivia sat up. Her head hurt; everything hurt. The darkness was suddenly disorientating.
“No, I’ll come down,” she said.
She sat at the kitchen table while James made her a ham sandwich. The curtains were all open and the sky looked very black outside. Like an eclipse, she thought, though it was just the night.
“What happened to Eve?”
“A lot of Chianti. A few tears.”
“Over the baby?”
James shook his head.
“Another row?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He sat down opposite Olivia and pushed a plate of sandwiches across the table.
“Good?” he asked, after a moment.
“Yes. Thank you. It’s very nice of you. Nice of you to invite us here, too.”
He smiled. “Glass of wine? There’s a bottle open.”
They must have started a second bottle, Olivia realised. Or perhaps a third. She took a sip from the glass James gave her and felt it run down inside her, warm and blood-red.
“Thank you,” she said again. It felt good to be looked after, to have someone around who passed for a higher authority. An adult. Eve would scoff at that; or perhaps she wouldn’t. Eve had been hard to read for the last few days.
“A nasty experience for you,” said James. “The baby and everything.”
Olivia nodded. She could feel her eyes filling with tears. “We should have left her where she was,” she said. “Perhaps someone had gone to call an ambulance.”
James shook his head. “You did the right thing. How could you leave her? If someone else had found her first and gone for help, they would have taken her with them.”
There was silence for a moment. Fragments of time swirled in Olivia’s head, forming and reforming like a kaleidoscope: the sea, the baby, the wine; bubble bath and empty lanes and the noise of the car’s engine. She thought back to the beginning of the summer and couldn’t imagine herself there again.
“I wanted to tell you something,” James said. Olivia looked up, alerted by a change in his voice. “Something about when I was little. Four.”
James poured himself some more wine and took a long swig.
“We used to come here every summer, my parents and my sister and I, with Sally and Jack and their boys. My second cousins, Peter and David. They were twins, a year older than me. They were wilder and braver than me; I idolised them.” He hesitated, looking at Olivia. “One day, when it was too rough for swimming, we were playing at the edge of the sea. Peter and David were running in and out, getting soaked by the spray, while I stood at the edge and watched. Then a breaker knocked them over and the current caught them and they both disappeared, just like that. I was still standing on the beach when the adults found me, staring out to sea.”
For a moment or two Olivia couldn’t think what to say.
“So you had to tell them?”
“Yes. It took a while for them to grasp what had happened.” James cupped a hand around his wine glass, cradling it lightly between his fingers. “I wanted you to know,” he said. “It wasn’t my fault, there was nothing I could have done, but it changed things, my being there when it happened.”
“Poor you.”
“It was a long time ago. I was a little boy.”
“But you’ve never forgotten. You’ll never forget.”
“No, I suppose not.”
Olivia let her gaze rest on him, taking in the shadow of stubble along his jaw, the translucent skin above his cheekbones. Tender, she thought. There was a tenderness about him that was more noticeable at this time of night. “Did they have other children?” she asked.
James lifted his glass and took another mouthful of wine, swilling it thoughtfully before swallowing. “They had another baby a couple of years later,” he said. “Amelia. She’s fifteen now.”
“It must be a burden for her.”
“What?”
“Replacing her brothers. A responsibility.”
James looked at her; a straight look, considering. “She’s not aware of that,” he said, after a moment. “She has Down’s syndrome.”
Tears welled again in Olivia’s eyes. “I’m so sorry, James.”
James shrugged. “One damaged girl for two perfect boys? I suppose you could see it like that. But she’s a sweetheart, Amelia. It’s a blessing she doesn’t understand the gap she was expected to fill. She could never have done that, but she’s filled their lives. They love her.”
In the silence Olivia heard the click and hum of the fridge, the wheeze of the windows in the breeze that comes off the sea at night.
“It changes your view of misfortune, a tragedy like that,” James said. “What’s an extra chromosome, a kink in the genetic code, if it’s part of a live child? If it means you can go on being parents?”
Olivia thought of the baby – her baby – lying so still and uncomplaining in her arms. I couldn’t have kept her, she told herself, even if she’d lived. I had no claim on her.
“But still,” she said. She glanced at the dresser, with its cheerful muddle of crockery and photographs, and noticed for the first time a bleached snapshot of three children standing smiling on the beach. “Didn’t they want to sell the house, after what happened?”
James leaned across the table and touched her face with his finger. A tentative touch, like a
child’s.
“We all love it here,” he said.
Olivia shut her eyes for a moment. She could feel the house around them, the magic of it, and the touch of James’s finger lingering on her cheek. She was conscious of a new feeling threading through her body now, a twist of feelings tangled sickeningly together. Besides grief and compassion there was desire, but desire complicated by shame. She could glimpse the possibility of consolation, the chance to account blessings against tragedy, but she was afraid that accepting the invitation in James’s eyes would only make things worse.
“I’d better go back to bed,” she said. “We’re leaving in the morning. We’ve got a long drive.”
“There’s no hurry,” James said. “We might as well finish the bottle.”
Now, when he looked at her, she had the sense that he could read her mind; that every turn of reason, every shade of feeling was laid bare. He smiled, and Olivia felt a wash of emotion so powerful that the world swayed again like a boat caught in a storm. She needed to keep hold, she thought. She needed something to anchor herself to; she just wasn’t sure what it was.
James kept his eyes on her as he reached across to pour the last dregs of wine into her glass.
The floorboards sighed as Olivia crossed the landing to her bedroom door. Their joints had been softened and stiffened by the salt and the damp of decades, and they moaned and whispered now with every movement. Olivia could hear too – could she? – the faint sound of the sea, the waves breaking on a new day down below. Outside her bedroom door she halted, her hand already on the doorknob. The house fell silent, waiting. After a moment, a long moment of hesitation, she turned and tiptoed back across the stairwell.
The Partridge and the Pelican Page 4
