Chapter 29
“I had trouble parking,” Eve said. There she was, standing on the doorstep. Coming into Olivia’s house.
Olivia held the door wide. “I’ve got a vistor’s permit, if you need it.”
Eve shook her head. “I found a space round the corner.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Well, this is nice. It’s exactly the kind of house I imagined you living in.”
“A pigsty?” Olivia’s laugh sounded nervous.
“A proper house – back garden, original features.”
“Boringly conventional.”
“Why not?” Eve looked straight at her, and Olivia quailed, recognising too late her own tactlessness. “If you can be conventional, why not?”
Benjy was sitting at the kitchen table with his Nintendo. Olivia felt absurdly grateful, at that moment, for the presence of her youngest son
“This is Eve, Benjy,” she said. “She was at school with me.”
Benjy looked up, briefly curious. “Hi,” he said, before lapsing back into whatever world he was engrossed in.
“Hi, Benjy.” Eve had that over-careful tone children pick up instantly, Olivia thought. Like an animal recognising a scent. Benjy kept his head down and Eve stared at him for a few moments.
“Sweet child,” she said.
He did look like an angel, his blond hair curly and picturesquely wild, shoulders hunched inside his school jumper, but Olivia could tell Eve was already fixed on her own image of a child. A little Chinese girl.
“So show me the pictures,” she said, before they had sat down, before they could get any further.
“Her name’s Huan.” Eve slid the photographs out of a thick envelope. “It means happiness. Let’s hope that’s prophetic.”
Olivia took the pictures from her. They were better than she expected, close-up shots of the baby’s face. She had flawless skin, beautiful eyes that looked directly, untroubled, at the camera.
“She’s a darling,” Olivia said; but part of her was shocked by the idea of this child becoming Eve’s daughter. From the opposite side of the world, she thought. A child she knows nothing about, who could have belonged to anyone. What an extraordinary thing to do. Especially for Eve to do.
Eve looked at her, waiting for something more.
“How old is she?” Olivia asked.
“Six months. I’m lucky, they’re often older. A year or more in an orphanage is a terrible thought.”
“Well …” said Olivia. Eve was frowning now; looking to her as the expert, perhaps. Olivia wasn’t used to that idea. “D’you want a drink?” she asked. “A glass of wine?”
“There’s all this stuff about early interaction,” Eve said, taking the photographs back while Olivia busied herself with glasses and corkscrew. She was wearing another of her flowing outfits, in some grey material that Olivia imagined had been more expensive than it looked. She wasn’t dressed for motherhood, Olivia thought; and then she thought, what a ridiculous notion. What were mothers supposed to look like?
“The important neuronal patterns get established within the first year,” Eve went on. “Don’t you think that’s important?”
Olivia remembered this feeling of walking a tightrope, second-guessing Eve’s train of thought.
“But there’s more to childhood than the first year,” she said. “And they won’t have been mistreated, surely.” She thought of Georgie; of the way people could be damaged at any age.
Eve shook her head. “They’re hideously under-resourced. You can imagine.”
“Isn’t she lucky to get you, then?” Olivia handed Eve a glass. “Cheers,” she said, “and hurray for Huan,” although the toast sounded wrong, once she’d said it. Too flippant and too earnest, all at once.
“Odd how things end up,” said Eve. “Still, you’ve done exactly what we all imagined.”
“All?”
“At school,” Eve said. She lifted her wine glass, considered its contents. “You were always going to get married and have hundreds of children.”
“I was going to be a concert pianist,” Olivia protested.
Eve laughed. “Since when? You were an earth-mother in training at thirteen.”
There was no point rising, Olivia thought. Even less point now than at thirteen. Another memory: never being sure whether Eve’s throwaway remarks were meant to be hurtful.
The oven timer sounded, breaking the silence. Olivia had wanted to cook something imaginative, but it was safer to fall back on the things you could do blindfold. She lifted a casserole dish out of the oven, releasing reassuring wafts of bolognese sauce, and set it down on the side.
“Top up?” she asked.
“Better pace myself. I’m driving.”
“You could always stay.”
It was a reflex; the kind of thing you said without thinking. But when Eve didn’t answer, Olivia turned her head and caught an unfamiliar expression on her face. Wanting something, Olivia thought. “We’ve got a spare room,” she said, wondering even as she heard the words whether she would regret pressing the invitation. “I’m not going anywhere tomorrow morning.”
Eve didn’t smile; she’d never wasted her smiles on Olivia. You had to guess at her approval, Olivia thought, as well as her contempt.
“I suppose I could,” she said.
Olivia turned back to the stove, her hands suddenly clumsy. She didn’t know what to think, now: was Eve lonely, perhaps, or frightened? Perhaps she’ll never leave, she thought, as she filled a pan with water. Perhaps she’ll move in here with her little girl, like the plot of some big-hearted film.
Eve was better with the boys than Olivia expected. She talked to Tom about his university applications and was charmed by Alastair, as everyone was. Angus told jokes; progressively dirty jokes from Family Guy, his latest passion. Even Benjy joined in, describing The Sims, patiently explaining the new features in the updated version he’d got for his birthday. Olivia’s head hurt after a while, from tension and tiredness and everyone talking at once, but she felt proud of them, nonetheless. Even of Eve, coping with culture shock. Which of the options she’d considered in the coffee shop would this count as, she wondered, with a shaft of self-deprecation?
After supper the boys disappeared like mist, ignoring Olivia’s remonstrations about washing up. Olivia gestured hopelessness, resignation.
“At least I don’t have to put them to bed any more,” she said. “No more scrabbling around for toothbrushes and pyjama bottoms.”
She scraped back her chair and started clearing the last things off the table. They’d finished a bottle of wine already.
“Do you miss all that?” Eve asked. “The baby bit?”
Olivia shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s weird to think they’ll be more or less gone, the lot of them, by the time I’m fifty. All those years of small children, then – bang! Off to university, out into the world.”
It surprised her to hear herself saying these things to Eve. It was as though the conversations she’d run in her head over the last few weeks were being played live; as though some interminable rehearsal was over.
She took another bottle of wine out of the rack with a reckless surge of elation. They were drinking red; she’d have a headache in the morning, but it was worth it. She felt a twinge of guilt about Sarah, still struggling with her plaster cast, usurped by her old adversary, but it didn’t last. Eve was Eve. Back from the dead.
“Maybe you could adopt a baby too,” Eve said.
Olivia laughed. “Robert would hit the roof. Four lots of university fees to pay already.”
“A little girl,” Eve wheedled.
Olivia shook her head. I’ve had my turn, she wanted to say, but that was obvious, even tactless.
“Didn’t you ever want a daughter?”
Eve always did have a way of probing, Olivia remembered. Pressing James about his family, not realising there were things he didn’t want to talk about, that had nothing to do with her. Though perhaps this had everything to do with her.
She forced the tip of the corkscrew through the foil, her back to Eve, and waited to see where the conversation was going.
“Four boys – that came as a bit of a surprise,” Eve said. “I always thought of you with girls.”
Olivia sat down, placing the wine between them.
“I always thought of you with that baby, I suppose,” Eve said. “The phone box baby. The way you held her.”
‘Her’ was the word that struck Olivia. At the time, Eve had said ‘it’. Olivia thought of Eve’s unborn baby again, of the fact that Eve had been pregnant before her. She thought of that last night in Aldeburgh, holding Eve in the dark, and the tiny creature lodged inside her. She felt her heartbeat quickening. The shipwreck, she thought. This was the moment for it.
“Yes,” she said.
Go on, she meant. Truth or dare: I’m ready for it now. Somewhere upstairs she could hear the thump of rock music, filtered through several layers of floorboards; a strange reassurance.
“The pelican mother,” Eve said. “That’s you to a tee, isn’t it? Piercing your breast for your babies. For any babies you could get your hands on, back then.”
“What do you mean?”
Eve laughed. “Of course, I forget you’re not Catholic. Don’t you have pelicans in your churches? The mother surrounded by a flock of chicks, wounding her breast to feed them her own blood? They thought that’s what pelicans did, before they realised they kept fish in their bills for their young. It was too good an image to waste, anyway. Self-sacrificing maternal love. The sacrifice of Christ for his children.”
“I’ve never heard of that.” Olivia’s heart was beating fast still. It was clear from Eve’s tone that they were on perilous ground; part of her hoped they weren’t going to skirt away now they’d got this close.
“Olivia the pelican,” Eve said again, the edge of mockery in her voice stronger this time. “Whereas I, of course, am a partridge. A stealer of other bird’s eggs.”
“Is that – “
“More medieval iconography,” Eve said. “The partridge steals other birds’ eggs to raise as her own. Unless they die first, of course.”
Olivia tried to speak again, but Eve silenced her with an impatient flick of her hand.
“I know how it must have looked to you,” she said. “I know you thought I was vile that day. Heartless.”
For a moment Olivia didn’t believe she was really speaking, because the words were exactly the ones she’d have imagined Eve saying, if she’d ever dared to play this conversation in her head.
“No,” she said, though she knew there was no point denying it.
“Perhaps knowing I was pregnant alters things a bit, but even so. You wouldn’t have reacted like that, would you? You’d have been even more full of anguish if you’d been pregnant. Even more zealous to help her.”
All of a sudden Olivia felt horribly sober. She picked up the wine bottle and poured them each a glass.
“It was a long time ago,” she said at last.
“I want you to know I’m not a monster,” Eve said. “I want you to think I’m going to be a decent mother, that I deserve this chance. This baby.”
“Of course you are. Of course you do.”
“It doesn’t work out for the partridge,” Eve said. “The stolen babies fly back to their real mothers when they hear their cries.”
Olivia could feel herself trembling. Eve’s vulnerability had always frightened her more than Eve’s manipulations. Enough, she thought. This is a terrible idea.
“You’re not a partridge,” she said. “It’ll all be fine. That little baby has nothing to do with yours – with Huan.”
Eve picked up her wine glass then put it down again roughly, slopping wine onto the bare surface of the table.
“All that week, I watched James looking at you.”
Again, a change of tack Olivia wasn’t ready for.
“James?”
“Maybe you didn’t mean to lead him on. Maybe you didn’t even realise what the game was, until that last day. You must remember that: how I found you in the blanket box on the top landing, wrapped in each other’s arms.”
Olivia remembered the smell of the wardrobe where she’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Eve, the lingering scent of adult lives. She remembered the rest of that day too, every detail. She’d lived through it time after time, grasping at the primitive belief that enough effort of will, enough regret and remorse and repentance, could change the way things had ended up.
“It was sardines,” she said. “Nothing more.”
But Eve ignored her.
“I’d known I was pregnant for a while,” she said, her voice dangerously calm. “I should have known, anyway; I did my best to ignore it. But then I couldn’t ignore it any more, the nausea and the tiredness, being upset by the least thing.”
The man at the stone circle, Olivia remembered. The rows that had become more frequent as the summer went on.
Outside, a siren raced past on the main road.
“I bought a test after we got to Aldeburgh. I was ill, do you remember?” Eve gave a little ironic emphasis to the word ‘ill’. “I lay in bed and hoped it would go away. Things were different back then. I wasn’t sure whether they’d let me back into medical school with a baby. I wasn’t even sure I was going to tell James. But every time I saw him looking at you – “
Olivia shook her head slightly, almost involuntarily, and Eve looked straight at her, something close to hatred in her eyes. Olivia remembered that last night, the wine and the family secrets, and she blushed crimson.
Eve raised her eyebrows, let the silence harden for a moment.
“Every time I saw him looking at you I had an image of us, me and him and the baby. I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted, but I didn’t want it taken away from me, either.”
She stopped, took a mouthful of wine and swilled it down. Olivia noticed the lines around her neck, the definite way she’d aged. Almost as if someone had taken the Eve she knew and applied layers and layers of stage make up, a dash of grey to her hair. Sometimes she felt it wasn’t quite convincing, this disguise; that the old Eve was still there underneath, defiant, triumphant, ready to peel back the mask.
“Then there was that other baby,” Eve said. “The phone box baby. God, I don’t know if I can tell you what that felt like. The reality of it, showing me what I was carrying around inside me. What I was planning to kill.”
Olivia couldn’t speak. Of course Eve hadn’t been able to bear the sight of the baby: it had been the final straw, the worst coincidence possible. She had assumed that the tragedy of that day was all hers, that the guilt and the trauma and the repercussions had left Eve untouched. Pure selfishness, she saw now. Pure misguided self-righteousness.
“You can accuse me of whatever you like,” Eve said, “but you took away the possibility of my family. Even if I could have talked James into standing by me, how could I do it when I knew he preferred you – even you – to me?”
Olivia lifted her eyes to meet Eve’s and saw that she was shaking.
“He was horrible.” Eve made a noise like a sob or a choke of anger. “I told him that night, after we got back from the hospital. I was hideously nervous, after the argument at lunchtime, but I thought he’d be nicer after the baby incident. More understanding.” Eve shook her head, as if trying to dislodge something that was stuck inside. “He said all the things men say in these circumstances. All the worst things. That it was my problem, my decision; that he’d assumed I was on the Pill. He could be cruel, you know. You never saw that, but he could.”
Olivia thought about what James had told her that night, after Eve had gone to bed – the drowned cousins, the damaged sister. That didn’t excuse his behaviour, or even explain it. It just showed that he understood life was complicated, that he’d had his share of tragedy too. But she resisted the temptation to tell Eve. What good could it do?
“It made me want to have my baby,” Eve said. “It made me want it desperately, and
at the same time want to get rid of it before it was too late. Before it took me over. After that day, I couldn’t see any alternative.” There were tears on her cheeks now. Olivia didn’t think she’d ever seen Eve cry before, not properly. “How could I know it was the only chance I’d ever get?”
“You were only nineteen.” This seemed to Olivia, suddenly, to be the final truth of the matter: they had been children, little more. Not a partridge and a pelican; not anything so definite or irrevocable. She felt a great compassion for Eve, back across the years, and with it a gushing sense of relief. She was on safe ground again; she could be the mother, the adult, now. She could see a way through the quicksand, out to the shipwreck. “We were both so young,” she said.
But Eve showed no sign of having heard her, and when Olivia reached her hand across the table, she withdrew hers.
“There,” she said. “Now you know it all. And now I think I’ll go home.”
“Home?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Please don’t,” Olivia said. “You’ve drunk too much, surely. It’s too late now.”
She had no idea what time it was: the darkness came so early at this time of year, without a gradual dusk to measure out the evening by. But that wasn’t what she meant. She meant it was too late to stop now.
“I’ll take the risk,” Eve said.
“Why?” Olivia’s voice sounded querulous, but she didn’t care. “There are other things to talk about …”
“Such as?”
Olivia recognised that look: Eve’s eyes set hard, unyielding. Such as the rest of the story, she thought; the parts that mattered to her. Leaving things in this state was calamitous. But her nerve failed her, in the face of the challenge in Eve’s eyes.
“We haven’t talked about your baby,” she said instead. “Huan. About when you’re going to China, what happens next.”
Eve shook her head slowly.
“I don’t want you to have anything to do with my baby.”
Olivia gaped at her. “But that’s why you came, isn’t it? To show me the pictures, to talk about it?”
Eve went on shaking her head.
“I came to set the record straight,” she said. “I needed to get it off my chest, all that ancient history, before I went to China. I needed you to hear it. I don’t care whether you understand, or whether you still blame me – “
The Partridge and the Pelican Page 20
