Don did wonder if he should ring Alex’s parents. In fact, he thought it odd that they hadn’t rung us. ‘You would think,’ he said, ‘they would have wanted to have some contact with the parents of the girl their son is taking to sail in their boat.’ It was in ways like this that Don was – is – so old-fashioned. It made me smile, and feel so fond of him. It was I who discouraged him. I reminded him that Miranda was eighteen. She wasn’t a child. She had met Alex’s parents and they’d made up their own mind about her. They didn’t need to check out her parents. And so he never did ring them. The only time we ever saw them was at the inquest, across the room.
We did get a letter from them, once it was all over. A letter delivered by hand, at night. I was awake, as I usually was then, and I heard the gate open and heard footsteps on the gravel path and then the sound of the flap of the letterbox dropping back into place. Another person frightened to face us, I thought. Later, much later, when I did read the letter, I remember thinking how devoid of feeling it was and I understood Don’s disgust when he opened it and said, ‘Three lines – three! – and that’s all.’ But Alex’s father is a barrister and, though there was no blame attached to his son at the inquest, he was doubtless being extremely careful. We did not, after all, know the man or his wife. What else could they have said, except how sorry they were, how tragic the accident, what a beautiful girl our daughter had been, how we had all their sympathy. The restrained, formal tone of those three lines was in keeping with their relationship, or lack of it, to us. Curious, then, that it seemed so offensive.
Alexander tried harder. He came to our house one evening, just appeared at the door. Unfortunately, Don answered. It wasn’t late, about half past nine, I think, but it was almost dark and the security light wasn’t working, so all Don saw was the figure of a man standing a good way back from the door. He hadn’t put the hall light on either, so this whole encounter took place in gloom. I was in the kitchen, clearing up the remains of a meal neither of us had felt like eating. I heard Don say, ‘Hello?’ and then didn’t quite catch the reply. I heard only the low murmur of a man’s voice. I thought it was someone collecting for charity. But then I heard Don’s raised voice and I realised he had stepped outside the house. The words ‘dare’ and ‘come here’ came to me, and I went to the open doorway myself. I was in time to see Don push Alex, though I hadn’t yet identified him, and I shouted to Don to stop it and rushed forward to grab his arm. Then I saw who it was he had been pushing. ‘Alex!’ I said, and he said, ‘Mrs Roscoe,’ and Don said, ‘Just go. I’m sorry I pushed you.’ Alex, hands in his jacket pocket and head bent, muttered that it was all right, he understood. Don said he understood nothing, and then he walked back into the house.
I was left with Alex. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just came to say …’ and then he became incoherent, and I only picked up isolated words, ‘sorry’, ‘terrible’ and I could hardly bear it and rushed to stop him floundering on. I found myself saying that it wasn’t his fault (though of course he hadn’t said it was). I actually apologised for my husband’s behaviour. I said something to the effect that we were very upset and not really able to talk or think properly. He lifted his head, and his expression was one I knew well, from Finn – a grimace which could be mistaken for a smirk by those who didn’t know it was an effort to conceal emotion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, again. His voice was hoarse and barely audible. ‘We’ll talk later, another time,’ I said, and then he did turn and go down our short path to the gate, his hands, either side of him, giving funny flipping movements.
There never was another time. I thought it brave of him to have come at all, but Molly didn’t, and neither, of course, did Don. It was one of the few things they agreed on, in those early days. Molly thought that Alexander had taunted Miranda with being a coward, scared to sail on her own. Molly also thought apologising was too easy. Once you’ve apologised, especially when you know you can’t really be blamed, you feel you’ve done your bit. You’ve behaved well, there’s nothing else you can do. ‘He told everyone,’ Molly said later. ‘He made sure everyone knew he’d come round to our house and apologised, and he told them how angry Dad had been and how he hadn’t given him a chance to explain, and how he’d shoved him in the chest.’
But Finn’s attitude was different. He once went so far as to say, in Don’s hearing, that he felt sorry for Alexander. Don asked him, in a tight, quiet voice (which ought to have warned Finn off) why this was. Finn said what happened wasn’t Alex’s fault but that we were holding him responsible. ‘Think how he feels,’ Finn said. Don stared at him for a while and then reminded him that at the inquest it came out that Alex turned his attention to another girl, which had led to the argument that caused Miranda to take the boat out on her own. She would never have done so if she hadn’t been so distressed and not in her right mind. And it was Alex’s attitude which had caused her distress. There was no getting away from it, Don said. ‘You mean jealousy,’ Finn said. ‘She was jealous, she couldn’t take the thought she might be dumped. You can’t blame Alex for that. Think how he feels.’ ‘No,’ Don said, ‘I will not think how he feels. I have no interest in how he feels.’
Not long ago, Finn appeared with a newspaper cutting he wanted me to read. It was about a boy who killed his girlfriend in a jet-ski accident. He admitted causing the fatal accident through recklessness. But the point of Finn showing it to me was because he wanted me to read about the girl’s grieving parents. The father was quoted as saying the death of his beloved, beautiful daughter was a tragic accident and that he didn’t want the boy to suffer any more. ‘And he actually did kill her,’ Finn said. The mother was reported as saying that she absolved the boy of any blame. He had ‘succumbed to a momentary lapse in concentration’ and had never intended any harm. The idea of him being arrested and imprisoned horrified the mother – ‘He will never get over this,’ she said, ‘and that is enough punishment. Nothing that’s done to him can bring our daughter back.’ ‘Remember how Dad behaved?’ Finn asked. ‘Couldn’t be like that, could he?’ No, he couldn’t. He can’t. But Finn’s disgust, if that was what it was, and his desire that Don should have been magnanimous and noble, made me want to defend his father. Yet at the same time I, too, would have been so proud if Don had managed to react as the father in this other case evidently had done. It was a mistake for us not to listen to what Alexander had come to say. We should have asked him in, and been polite, however hard it would have been. We had heard him speak only at the inquest – there was surely a great deal more he could have told us. It had never made sense to us that Miranda chose to take his boat out on her own. It had been interpreted as an act of defiance, but was it? Why hadn’t she just left, come home? Had Alex taunted her with being a poor sailor? What exactly had their argument been about? By turning Alex away, Don would never find out.
And now, all this time afterwards, here was a card from him, to me. He must be in his last term. I wonder why he has sent it. The words give no clue. It is addressed only to me, not to me and Don, or to the family in general. Had I really once said, in Alexander’s hearing, or to Miranda who’d repeated it to him, that Durham was my favourite cathedral? I didn’t know I had a favourite cathedral. But it is a pretty card. I won’t tear it up. Why should I? Don would.
*
When I was writing about Alexander, there was an interruption. My doorbell rang, and when I spoke through the intercom and asked who was there, a young woman’s voice, light and rather tremulous, said, ‘Please, I deliver to you.’ She didn’t sound like the usual delivery boys who tear around on motorbikes, and I wasn’t expecting anything to be delivered, but I thought I’d better go down and see what this was about. It was only five o’clock, on a sunny afternoon, and I could hear that my neighbours below were in, so there was no danger (danger is very much on everyone’s mind, locally, after a series of doorstep muggings reported in the local paper). I went down and opened the main door, but even before I did so I could see that this girl – she
was only a girl – was harmless. She was cradling what looked like a flat box in her arms and on top of it was a postcard, which she handed to me. It was written in capital letters, and said that she was Polish and that her father was very ill back in Warsaw and that he needed medicines, which she wanted to buy and send to him. She had drawings to sell and asked me to inspect them and perhaps buy one for what I thought it was worth. I handed the card back and she put it in her pocket, and with her eyes fixed on mine she began slowly to open the box and turn over a series of drawings. Her eyes flickered between looking at my face and down at her own drawings. They were all in pencil, heavily shaded, sketches of boats and ships, the last kind of images I wanted to look at. Anxiety was making her hands shake. I felt so sorry for her, sorry enough to buy something. I hadn’t brought any money down with me, and so asked her to wait. It’s a rule in this block that the outer door must not be left open, so I beckoned her into the lobby and then said I’d just run up and get some money. But as I set off up the stairs to my flat, she followed me. I stopped and said she didn’t need to come, but she obviously didn’t understand, and the minute I went on climbing the stairs she followed me once more.
She was only a girl, slight, unthreatening, but I didn’t want her to come into my flat. I was ashamed of this, but when I got to my own door, which I’d left open, I put up my hand and shook my head and she stopped, looking stricken, her shoulders hunched and tears in her eyes. Quickly, I rushed into my kitchen and snatched £5 from the cash I kept in the dresser drawer, and hurried back to her. She’d gone. I could hear her running down the stairs. I shouted ‘wait’ and ran after her. She was struggling to open the outer door, which has a very tricky catch, otherwise I could not have stopped her leaving. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean …’ But then I halted: what had I ‘not meant’? ‘Here,’ I said, and ‘please’ again, and I held out the five-pound note. She wouldn’t look at me. Mutely, the tears still wetting her pale cheeks, she opened her box of drawings and held them out again. I hardly looked at what I took, I didn’t want pictures of boats, of course, but it felt easier just to take something. Then I opened the door for her, and she left.
I watched her from my sitting-room window as she crossed the street and walked off. She trailed along, very slowly, head down, arms holding her box of drawings which she cradled protectively. On that side of the street there are no blocks of flats, only houses. She didn’t try any of them, just trudged past. At the corner, she stopped and stood still for several minutes. I couldn’t decide whether she was lost, or trying to make her mind up about what she should do. But then a white van drew up and the sliding door in the passenger part was pulled back and she climbed in. The van drove back down our street, passing our flats, and I saw there were other girls in it. Were they all selling drawings? Did they all have postcards written out for them, saying their fathers were ill and needed medicine?
I felt upset, without knowing why. I feel that I let that girl down. Maybe she needed help and was afraid to ask for it. I should have invited her in, and talked to her. But she didn’t speak English, so that would have been no good. I tore up the drawing at once. I went on worrying about her, though, worrying about all the young foreign girls like her, possibly at the mercy of unscrupulous people, finding themselves lost in this huge city and unable, perhaps, to get out of the situation they are in and find their way home.
*
There was a news item on television last night about a suicide bomber blowing up a bus in a seaside resort in Israel. I shouldn’t have watched it. Don used to be irritated by how I reacted to such scenes. ‘Imagine,’ I used to say, ‘imagine, those children, how can their parents bear …’ and he’d stop me.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t imagine, I don’t want to imagine anything about it. I’m surprised at you, Lou. You’re not, I hope, going to watch all this on television. Don’t. It does no good, you’ll just make yourself ill. We’ve had quite enough tragedy in our lives, we don’t need other people’s.’
I felt angry with Don. He has become so arrogant in his despair and misery, he really thinks he has been marked out for suffering far more than anyone else and that this entitles him to receive, but not give, sympathy. What happened to Miranda doesn’t have anything to do with the agonies undergone by the families of those killed in that horrible way in suicide bombings, but it doesn’t excuse us from trying to empathise with their distress. But Don somehow thinks that it does. He’s separated himself from the rest of the human race.
The children at school see these bombings on television. I remember that in the playground, where I was on duty that week, some of the boys were whooshing around, their arms flapping, wearing their little decorative rucksacks, and shouting ‘I’m a suicide bomber, I’m a suicide bomber.’ Paige asked me if all the dead people would have gone to heaven. Questions about death and dying pop up often enough in class and can’t be ignored, but it’s always hard to be both comforting and yet truthful. What I said this time, taking her hand, was that yes, if these poor people believed in heaven, they would have gone there. Unfortunately, Harry heard this. An older child would doubtless have asked me if I believed in heaven, which would have led to some evasions, but Harry said, ‘What’s heaven like?’ I said I didn’t know, that nobody knew. ‘Do you sit around with angels?’ he asked. I said maybe. ‘I don’t like sitting around,’ he said.
When Miranda was around four, she talked a lot about heaven. Her best friend (apart from Molly) had a very religious mother, a Roman Catholic, who brought her daughter up, at least when she was small, to believe absolutely in heaven as a delightful garden, full of flowers, where the sun always shone and everyone was good and kind, and nothing nasty ever happened. When someone died she said they went on a journey to this garden. Miranda accepted her story completely. She wanted to go to heaven, even if it meant leaving all of us. I didn’t spoil her fantasy, reckoning it would soon enough be challenged by events, as it was. My mother died. Miranda was seven by then, and very eager actually to see someone on their journey to heaven, so after endless discussions, Don and I decided that she should be allowed to see my dead mother, her beloved granny. Mum hadn’t had a terrible illness and did not look grotesque, or we would never have let any of the children see her. She looked rather lovely, in fact, her face still plump and hardly lined. (She was only seventy-two, and died of a heart attack, never having been ill – it was unexpected and we were shocked.) The funeral premises where she was taken wasn’t a scary place, and the funeral director wasn’t a solemn, forbidding man, but a rather pleasant, gentle chap who didn’t think his trade prevented him from smiling at a child.
We, Don and I, each held Miranda’s hand (Molly refused to come) and we took her into the little room where her granny lay, clad in a simple white gown, her still dark hair beautifully brushed, her hands resting on her stomach. Miranda stared and stared, and Don and I tensed, worrying that she would burst into tears or start screaming. She never said a word. But afterwards, on the way home, she asked how her granny would get to heaven when she was asleep and couldn’t move. Don launched into a long rigmarole about how some people thought one thing and some people another and everyone being entitled to their opinion, but long before he had finished Miranda said, ‘I don’t think Granny can get to heaven.’ And then, after more thought, ‘I don’t think heaven can be a place.’ We left it at that.
4
THE WOMAN IN the ground-floor flat in my block has just had twins, boys. I must send her a card and something for the babies. When I knew I was expecting twins – I could hardly believe it, since there was no history of twins on either side of our families – I started reading up on them. I didn’t know, at the time, whether my twins would be identical (they were not) or the same sex, which, of course, they were, so a great deal of what I learned wasn’t strictly applicable. But still, I was well prepared to expect rivalry between them as they grew up, for one twin to be the stronger, or the leader, or more favoured, and I�
�d absorbed all the advice about how to deal with these various problems. What had cheered me most, though, and hugely outweighed my worries, was that the general consensus of opinion seemed to be how devoted twins usually are to each other. I love that idea. Maybe all only children do.
It felt exciting to me, to be bearing twins. It was Don who was apprehensive – he couldn’t see how we could manage two at once when neither of us had any experience of babies. And then there was the cost. We would need two of everything, though both sets of grandparents rushed with generous offers, almost competing over who would buy the cots, the pram, the highchairs, etc. He was anxious, too, about the birth itself, and relieved when the doctor decided I should have a caesarean. But I didn’t have a caesarean. The date for it was fixed but I went into labour the week before and against all expectations, and most unusually with first babies, especially twins, dilated so rapidly that by the time we got to the hospital it was too late. Molly was 4 lb 9 oz, and Miranda, arriving twenty minutes later, 3 lb 12 oz. They were both healthy, though Miranda was in an incubator at first. Don sat by the incubator for ages, while I nursed Molly. When they took her out, he held her before I did.
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