And I suppose she decided she wanted to help, because when I came home from work, having half forgotten that I’d put the washing machine on at all, what should I be greeted with when I walked through the gate but a dozen of your shirts, waving at me from the line. And it really was greeting and waving, because despite all of Auntie Brenda’s nagging (or maybe because of it), Mel never could hang a shirt on a washing line properly, and pegged them all by the shoulders, instead of the hems, as usual. So at first glance it was a chorus line of you.
I didn’t see that one coming. I didn’t protect myself from my sister’s kindness and effort and support. I felt the way I feel when I pick up the post and there’s a letter addressed to both of us: as though life has stuck out one of its nasty stinky feet and tripped me up again, when I’d only just staggered up after the last thing.
I’ve ironed the shirts, and folded them, and put them in a pile on the chair in the corner of our bedroom, with the bag of hexagons on top. If you were watching me bring them in from the line, you’d have seen me holding them to me as though you were inside them still.
We’ll see.
E xxxxx
Now
Elizabeth is waiting when Mel and Blake arrive. She has something that she wants to say. There have been a lot of casual mentions of her birthday, and Mel’s birthday, and there seems to have been more whispering in corners than usual. So she has decided to tell them that there will be no celebration: no candles, no singing, not even the plainest meal in the quietest restaurant they can find.
What she wants, really, is to sleep through the whole of the wretched day. In fact, she’d like to sleep through every festivity between now and then, “then” being, as far as Elizabeth can gather, the point at which she can find a way to live a normal life. Andy, Blake, Mel, and Patricia never seem to tire of reassuring her that this day will come. Andy leaves books about grief that say the same, and which she refuses to look at since she flicked through the contents section of the first one he brought and saw the word “acceptance” in there. Elizabeth does not feel like moving toward acceptance. She does not accept that she’s in a process. She can see that if she had a child, the way Patricia had had Mike when John died, then there would be some point in birthdays and Christmases and generally pretending that life was going on. But Elizabeth doesn’t feel that way. She’s not trying to be maudlin; she’s not running toward the blackness. It’s just there. It’s just everywhere. So she’s determined to make Mel understand that, to get her to see that, at the moment, with all that’s going on, having even the smallest, meanest of birthday gatherings would be about as appropriate as putting on a bikini and a party hat and going to a funeral. Another funeral.
Pepper tumbles around Elizabeth’s feet as Mel and Blake stand in the doorway. Elizabeth clears her throat and says, “I wanted to talk to Mel, but Blake, you may as well hear this too.” As though she hasn’t heard, Mel says, “I think I probably need to go first,” and at this odd statement Elizabeth looks up, assuming she’s misheard, sees the look on her sister’s face, and takes a deep breath. No, no, no, her heart pleads. No more. Not something else. She sits.
Then Mel is kneeling in front of Elizabeth. She’s nodding to Blake, who says he’ll be in the kitchen, and she’s remembering the advice he’s just given her: Tell her now, because you can control the way she hears it; tell her fast, because she’ll know something is wrong and her imagination will be working overtime; tell her clearly, because every word you say will be a word she’ll remember forever. It had all seemed sound and sensible when they’d talked about doing it. Now that Mel is on the brink of it, it seems like the pits.
Mel takes Elizabeth’s hands and looks into her wondering face. Knowing what she’s about to do is the bloodiest feeling she’s ever felt: a finger on a trigger at point-blank range.
“Did you know there’s a history of cystic fibrosis in Mike’s family?” she asks.
“Of course.” Elizabeth’s face is all bemusement. “We knew everything about each other. It was all part of the stuff we went through when we were trying to have a baby.” She remembers how scary the words had sounded when she first heard them, how she had been amazed and furious at how matter-of-fact Mike had been about the whole thing.
“Well”—and the bullet flies out of the barrel—“Patricia took it upon herself to tell Kate Micklethwaite about it, and Kate freaked out and has said that Mike is definitely the father of the baby. Blake found out about all this this morning, from the Micklethwaites. Rufus came here to tell you. He told me and I went to ask Patricia about it. Kate has spoken to the midwife about the possibility of the baby having it. Having cystic fibrosis. From Michael.”
But Elizabeth is more bulletproof than she looks. She shakes her head, squeezes Mel’s hand as though she’s the one who needs to be reassured, comforted. She is all big sister.
“That doesn’t mean anything. Prove anything. She’s told a lie and she’s seeing the lie through, that’s all. What are the chances that the baby will turn out not to have cystic fibrosis after all? It proves nothing, Mel. Nothing. You’re all far too eager to believe her. I knew Mike better than anyone, and I know it’s not true. You need to trust me.”
Mel closes her eyes, but when she opens them again, nothing has changed. Elizabeth’s mood, coming off her like a perfume, has high notes of anxiety, an afterglow of gloom. So Mel has no choice but to reload, take a breath, squeeze the trigger again. “There are pictures.”
Elizabeth enters that space between knowing that something has hit her and not yet knowing what it is. She can’t think what there might be pictures of: what cystic fibrosis would look like on a scan. She rummages through her memory. She did a lot of reading about it before the test showed she wasn’t a carrier, so although Mike was, cystic fibrosis could go on the “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” list. She can’t think that anything would be obvious.
Then Mel says, “Pictures of Kate and Mike.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elizabeth says, but there’s a space in her voice that lets Mel say more.
“I know,” Mel says, “but I think it’s time to face facts. Mike had some sort of thing with her, and we don’t know what, but it does seem that there’s a good chance this is his baby.”
Elizabeth thinks of Kate, of how she stood in her garden, a pale angel, and how she had gone down on her knees and begged to be told more. How her head then could have been no more than a hand span from where Mike’s child was starting to gird itself into growth and life.
She cannot feel her heart in her chest. She cannot feel her tongue in her mouth. As the bullet hits its mark Elizabeth’s guts turn over, over, over, and her eyes burn at the pain of trying to stay open and look at Mel, who is crying now. She can see that Mel is speaking, see her lips moving and hear something, but her ears are too bewildered to assemble the words into sense.
The words that Elizabeth wants to say are all lined up in her head, all ready to march down to her throat and out through her mouth and make all of this stop, with their power and their truth and their good, clear sense.
“Mel, it will be nothing. Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Mel, remember, this is Throckton. Everything gets out of proportion and when you get to the bottom of it, 90 percent of what you’d hear if you listened is barely true.”
“Mel, she’s just a little bitch trying to cover up the fact that she fucked some idiot boy at a party. How much more glamorous to latch on to my handsome, dead husband than to confess to getting drunk and not bothering with a condom because you’re nineteen and you still think the world is going to look after you?”
But Elizabeth’s tongue won’t work. She’s surprised she is breathing, because her heart is still and her lungs tight, her throat clenched. She looks at her sister, tearstained and pleading. And she stands, and she goes upstairs, and she sits on her bed, and she remembers her husband. His h
onest eyes. His clear smile. She remembers the days when he’d come home after difficult shifts—accidents, fights, domestic violence—and she would say, “But you could have been hurt.” And he would smile and touch her hair, and his fingers would slide down the side of her face until they ended under her chin, and he would say, “Don’t give it another thought, sweetheart.”
Don’t give it another thought. That’s the only way.
• • •
“Another day, another council of war,” Mel says grimly twenty-four hours later as she, Blake, and Andy face one another around the table again. “I haven’t seen her in twenty-four hours. I’ve spoken to her through the bedroom door. She’s refused everything. She’s called work and told them she won’t be in for the foreseeable future.”
“Is she eating?” Andy asks.
“There was a cereal bowl washed up when I came down this morning, so I assume so,” Mel says, “but she’s refused lunch and dinner and coffee. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried taking stuff up to her, I’ve tried asking what she wants, I’ve pleaded with her to come out, I’ve offered to go out so she can come downstairs without having to talk to me.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Andy says.
“Guilt by association,” Mel says.
“Have you actually seen her?”
“Yes, because I told her I was going to call you if she didn’t come to the door and show me she was all right.”
“And?”
“She opened the door, said, ‘Leave me alone, Mel; I’m all right, but I just want to be on my own,’ and shut the door again.”
“How did she look?”
“Well, I’m not experienced, but pretty much like you’d expect a woman whose sister has just told her that her dead husband was screwing around to look.”
Andy touches her lightly on the shoulder. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry, Andy.” Mel traces the inside of each eye socket in turn with the tip of the first finger on her right hand.
Both men, trained to notice small things, see that her nail is ragged, the varnish chipped and pulled.
Mel takes a breath, tries again. “She looks like she did when he died. But more disappointed. I don’t know if she’s disappointed in him for doing it, or in the rest of us for thinking that he might have. Which would be worse?”
“Well, assuming that it’s true, the longer she denies it, the worse it will be when…” Blake says.
“If nothing else happens,” Mel begins hopefully.
“If nothing else happens,” Blake says, “if things stay as they are, then by the time that baby is a month old all of Throckton will be in no doubt as to its paternity, because Patricia Gray will have a grandchild.”
Andy says, “He’s right.”
Mel says, “I keep thinking that all I need to do is get her on a plane. Tell her we’re taking a trip and take her home. She doesn’t have to watch the bloody kid grow up.”
“No,” Andy says, “but she might need to.” He and Lucy had talked this whole thing over last night, after Blake had been.
“If I was her, I’d leave,” Andy had said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” his wife had answered. “If you were her, you couldn’t if you tried. Don’t forget, her husband is here, and she’s not going to be able to leave him until she’s sorted this out. Something is better than nothing.”
Mel gets up, reaches for her cigarettes, and is about to head for the back door when the sound of Elizabeth’s bedroom door opening, closing, her feet on the stairs transfixes them all.
“Elizabeth—” Andy begins, taking in the red of her eyes and the scrape of her hair, the way her hands tremble a little and the leg of her pajamas has a tear in it.
Elizabeth barely glances at him. “I’m not ill, Andy. I’m just really pissed off and I want to be on my own. Blake”—Blake has stood to greet her and reaches out to touch her arm, but she flinches at just the intention—“did you know about this? About this cystic fibrosis thing that everyone’s run away with?”
Blake says, “No. I found out from Richenda at about the same time as Rufus came to see Mel.”
Elizabeth nods, as though she’s ticking something off a list. “And did you know before? When this was supposedly happening?”
“No. I had no idea at all.”
“Exactly,” Elizabeth says, with a sort of desperate triumph. “If none of us knew then—not his wife, not the colleague he’d worked with for years, not his best friend”—she tips her head at Andy, a question, and he shakes his head in return—“if it wasn’t true then, why should it be true now?”
Blake sighs, glances around and sees it’s his turn to try. “I agree that it’s all circumstantial evidence, but there’s more and more of it. I’m sorry, Elizabeth, because it hurts me to even say it and I can’t imagine how much this is hurting you, but I think we have to entertain the possibility that this baby is Michael’s baby. I’m so sorry.”
For a minute it looks as though Elizabeth will hit him, but she doesn’t. Instead she glares at the three of them, one after the other, and Mel moves forward from where she’s standing and tries to take her arm.
Elizabeth pulls herself back, out of range, turns, leaves the room. As she goes, she calls back, “I want to see a photo. Blake, you’re supposed to be liaising, so liaise me one of her crappy Photoshopped pictures so I can see how she did it, the little bitch.”
• • •
Blake and Andy stand together by the gate.
“I keep going through it,” Blake says, “trying to think of what I missed. There must have been signs.” He has been over and over it the past few months, looking for the moment when he could have said, done, something.
“Me too,” Andy says. “Lucy noticed, when we all went for a drink after Bonfire Night, do you remember?” The Throckton Fireworks had been as good as washed out, and Michael, Elizabeth, and Blake had gone for a drink afterward, drawn to the promise of the open fire in the bar of the Red Dragon. Andy and Lucy had joined them after dropping the twins with their grandparents for an hour. It had been one of those evenings that had never quite gotten going. Michael, who could usually be relied upon to get a conversation started—even if it was about running—had been the quietest of all of them.
“Vaguely,” Blake says. “I remember we were all wet through and we went home early.”
“On the way back, Lucy asked what was wrong with Michael. I said I thought he hadn’t been himself since the fire. She said if he walked into a burning building when he knew it wasn’t safe, maybe the fire was the symptom, not the cause.”
Blake gives a laugh-that-isn’t. “She sounds like a better doctor than you.”
“I know. I didn’t think any more about it. I—” Andy seeks words that will explain the thrashing helplessness he’s feeling, the way the muscles in his neck knot whenever he thinks of how all this could have been going on without his even wondering about it. How whatever he is feeling must be amplified beyond all bearing in Elizabeth.
“I know,” Blake says. “I know.” And he thinks of all the crimes that happen under people’s noses, unnoticed because of their proximity, and the belief that someone so close would be incapable of doing such a thing.
“I wish we could do something more,” Andy says. Which gets Blake thinking.
And Andy and Blake shake hands and part.
Mike,
You wouldn’t believe what’s going on here. It’s stupid. I’m not going to insult you by even telling you about it. I’ve called their bluff. You used to say that about work: most times, you just call their bluff and it goes away. I do it at work sometimes, when people are horrible. If they threaten to go elsewhere, I smile and ask if they’d like me to call around some other hotels and find them a room. When that guy insisted his moussaka had given him food poisoning, even though thirty-five other people in
the restaurant had eaten it with no problem, and said he was going to report us, I wrote down the number of our contact at environmental health for him and we never heard another thing.
So. I’ve called their bluff, “good and proper” as your mother would say. (I may never be able to bring myself to speak to your mother again.)
While I’m waiting for this all to go away, I thought I’d start on the quilt. But something went wrong with the cutting out, and now all I have is shreds and shards of fabric. And when they were your shirts, I loved them; now that they’re material, they look broken and faded and frayed. Another plan awry.
I love you. I miss you. Every time I think I couldn’t get lonelier, I do.
E xxxx
This time, Blake had taken the precaution of calling ahead to make sure that Rufus wasn’t around. He hadn’t asked directly, of course, but Richenda had said, “Rufus is off seeing a client today, so it will be just Kate and me if that’s OK,” and Blake had said, “That will be perfect,” in a way that he thought afterward was a little too warm for the work he was about to do.
Richenda serves coffee in bowls today. “It’s a habit we picked up when we lived in France for a while,” she says and thinks as she says it of the lifestyle that that sentence implies: happy, carefree, part of a history of interesting adventures. Well, the adventure part could possibly be considered true, but their French year-and-a-bit she remembers as lonely and puzzling. She thinks of it now as the time when she could have, should have, gotten out; less than two years married, the certain knowledge of the great mistake she’d made becoming clearer every day. But then the thought of facing up to her disapproving mother and her disappointed father, a few uncomfortable months of living at home again and finding a new place in the world, had seemed worse than the prospect of muddling through another day with Rufus. So she’d stayed, and then there had been Kate, and then there was no point in regretting anything or wishing things were different.
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