Over

by Margaret Forster

  I felt wonderful, elated. It hadn’t been a dreadful experience at all. Painful, yes, but I was lucky – it was not long-drawn-out, I didn’t suffer as I did, later, with Finn, which has always struck me as odd (though since his weight was greater than the combined weights of the twins, that may have had something to do with it). Don, too, was thrilled. We spent at least the first two days in a haze of relief and happiness, staring at Molly and Miranda as though we had never seen a baby before (we hadn’t actually seen many). Bringing them home wasn’t quite such a joyous business. Reality struck quickly, and even though my very capable mother came to stay, within days we felt exhausted. Then my father had an accident, not a serious one but my mother had to go home to him, and Don got flu, and …

  How I like remembering that period in our lives. Afterwards, we used to reminisce about it, exaggerating the agony of the night-time feeds, describing to the girls the way they leapfrogged each other so that we never had any rest, and how there was no time to do anything but feed and change and wind and bathe them. Impossible, we used to say, chaos, rolling our eyes. But really we knew they were happy days, everything going right, the future something we looked forward to, and the past of no interest or importance whatsoever. There was nothing in it to hang over us and taint the present or make us apprehensive of what the future held.

  *

  Dress-up Friday. Every child was supposed to dress up as a character in their favourite story, in honour of World Book Day, when they will each receive a £1 book token. In the case of my children, the favourite story will have to be one that has been read to them, since only a few of them have begun to read and even they certainly couldn’t read a whole book by themselves. And at least half the class don’t have parents who read to them at home, so it’s what Jeremy and I have read to them that will count. Hard to dress up as the Gruffalo, but Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood and several other fairytales should come in useful. Best not to take it too seriously, but Paige, hungry for any sort of competition, will certainly do that. Her mother has been reading Dr Doolittle to her, which did surprise me. A book she apparently had herself as a child. Paige wants to be a Pushmi-Pullyu, with two heads. Good luck to her mum. ‘It’s an animal that can look two ways,’ Paige informed the rest of the class, who hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about. ‘Backwards and forwards,’ explained Paige. I took up the theme. Who would like to be able to look backwards and forwards at the same time? Would it be useful? Would it be fun? ‘It would make you dizzy,’ said Sita, ‘and sick.’ ‘You can do it in a car,’ Harry suddenly said. Harry never speaks in class. He is worryingly quiet and well-behaved. I asked him how, and he described the mirrors on his dad’s car. Paige was impressed in spite of herself. So was Jeremy. He said he’d guessed Harry was clever. ‘How do you think he’ll turn out?’ Jeremy said. I said it was impossible to know. Five-year-olds give few clues to what they will become, whatever the Jesuit view. Wouldn’t it be fascinating, Jeremy said, if we could look ahead and see Harry at twenty. No, I said, not really. I’d rather wait. At twenty, I thought, he could be dead.

  *

  Another meeting with Don. I thought I should be brave – no, not brave, sensible – and suggest that we meet in my flat. He seemed reluctant. I’d thought he might be pleased, but no, he hesitated and said, ‘Are you sure? Would it be a good idea?’ I said, ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ and he muttered something about not fitting in with my new life. But he came, yesterday.

  It hits me every time we see each other now how awful he looks. No wonder Pat didn’t recognise him. I can hardly bear it. It isn’t so much his air of self-neglect – his scruffy clothes, his greasy hair – but the pallor of his skin, the way he has aged and looks ill. I wanted immediately to be looking after him, as I always did, and as even at the worst time, I struggled to look after myself. We don’t embrace any more when we meet. He doesn’t make any attempt, and I don’t take the initiative, fearing that if I put my arms round him, or reach up to kiss his cheek, collapse might follow, of either of us, or both of us. We say hello, and he slouches forward, unhappy to be there, uncomfortable on my territory. I am hardly more at ease. ‘Coffee?’ I ask brightly, and lead him into the kitchen. He leans against the doorframe, hands in pockets, and watches me. ‘Small kitchen,’ he says, ‘not what you were used to.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘but it’s big enough for one. I don’t do much cooking now.’

  That was how it went on. The coffee made – I know exactly how he likes it, of course – we moved into the sitting-room. He made it look much smaller than I had ever realised it was, the way tall men always do. I told him to sit down, he was making me nervous, but he went on standing at the window for a while, looking out into the street as though he couldn’t believe it existed. There was a frown on his face, but then there nearly always is now. ‘Why did you choose here?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem your sort of place. I thought you’d go for something more …’ His voice trailed off. I waited. I wasn’t going to help him. But he shook his head, and at last sat down. He asked if I heard from Finn. I said he’d rung last week and that he kept in touch, in an irregular sort of way. ‘I’d like to go and see him,’ Don said. ‘Try to …’ And again, the sentence was left unfinished. ‘I think Molly …’ he began, and stopped. ‘With Molly …’ he started, and then with a big effort continued, ‘Molly has started to e-mail me,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be OK. We’ll see, when she comes back. But Findlay …’

  Findlay was my maiden name. I thought my father would like the idea, and he did. I was always going to shorten it to Finn, and he was never, except on his birth certificate and on other official documents since, called Findlay. Don wasn’t keen, but gave way to my wish and in the end came to like the shortened version. The only name he chose was Miranda’s. I wasn’t keen on that, thinking it too romantic, and that it sat oddly with her twin’s name, Molly, my adored grandmother’s name, which I’d had in my head waiting for a daughter, for years. To call Finn ‘Findlay’ all of a sudden was strange, and I laughed.

  ‘You’re getting very formal,’ I said, and queried, ‘Findlay?’

  ‘Finn’s a bit babyish,’ Don said, ‘now he’s grown-up.’

  ‘When you grew up,’ I reminded him, ‘you shortened your name. That wasn’t babyish?’

  Don’s full name was Gordon. He shortened it to Don as soon as he left home, at eighteen, and people always imagined his real name was Donald. When the children found out that he was christened Gordon they called him that whenever he was being particularly pompous, not that he very often was. Except now, suddenly. Finn would not like being given his full name. There is so little of Don in Finn – it’s really quite remarkable, how unlike father and son are. They don’t look alike, they have very different personalities and talents. But until this happened, till Miranda died, they got on well.

  Finn doesn’t want to go to university, which upsets Don. Finn can’t see there is any point. He says there’s no subject he likes enough to study for three years, and he thinks combination degrees a cop-out. Don tried to argue that what you study is not the important part of going to university, and gave him the spiel about having time to work out what you want to do, but it was no good. Finn thinks students are ‘dossers’. He wanted to work, straight away. The only concession he made, and that was because of the state we were all in afterwards, was that he would do A levels so that if, as his father hoped, he changed his mind later, then he’d have the qualifications he needed. But he dropped out of sixth form college after one term and started work.

  His job baffles Don. It baffles me too, but Finn seems happy enough and that’s all that matters. He’s not quite eighteen yet, there’s plenty of time (well, that may not be true, but it’s comforting to think so). As far as we can tell, Finn is a labourer for a landscape gardening firm. He says he’s learning the business from the bottom up. The bottom must be very muddy because when I do see him he is always filthy. He lives with his Aunt Judith, Don’s sister, because her
house is near his work. She doesn’t cook for him or wash his clothes or anything – she assures me he is quite self-sufficient – but he has his own room and the use of her kitchen and washing machine. I think she likes having him there, now that her own boys have moved out and David, her husband, died shockingly suddenly five years ago. Finn isn’t the only lodger she’s taken in – there is another young man, a nephew of David’s, who is at the LSE, and a woman, an ex-college friend, who is staying while her divorce goes through and she can get the money to buy another home. Judith likes a full house.

  I didn’t want to know the answer to the next question I asked, but all the same, looking at Don, seeing his exhaustion and his dejection, I asked it.

  ‘How are things going?’ I said. ‘Did that lead …?’

  He shrugged. ‘Disappointing,’ he said. ‘The man is a coward. He knows the truth but he won’t speak up. I got nothing audible on tape. He played loud music all the time we talked. But he gave me clues he didn’t even realise he was giving and I’ll follow them up.’

  I didn’t ask what these clues were. I saw Don was watching me carefully, hoping that I would, and that when he saw my polite, non-committal expression he could hardly bear it. It was he who changed the subject, back to Finn. ‘Has he changed his mobile number?’ he asked. I said, yes, he had, his original mobile was nicked. ‘Can I have the new number?’ he asked, producing his own mobile. I sat quite still. ‘You don’t mean,’ he said, ‘he doesn’t want me to have it?’

  ‘Not as strong as that,’ I said. ‘But he’d rather you didn’t phone him. It wouldn’t make any difference, you know what he’ll say, why he doesn’t want to see you. If … if things change, then the two of you can start again.’

  ‘They’ll never change,’ Don said, ‘if that means what I think it means.’

  He left soon after. Wouldn’t take any food. Said he had a lot of work to do. I asked how work was going and he said not well. The agency was so good to him afterwards, they let him have masses of time off, but by now they must be fed-up with Don’s frequent absences while he makes investigations. When we were still together, I used to be terrified that he would be ‘let go’. It’s only because he is so good at his job that they keep him, I imagine. It was Don, after all, who only two years ago won a marketing effectiveness award for them. The thought of Don without a job is unbearable – unemployed, he would go to pieces, if he hasn’t, in so many ways, done so already.

  *

  Book group tonight. Afterwards, the first month afterwards, when the evening for the meeting came round, and I saw the words written on the kitchen calendar, it never occurred to me to go, or even to ring Alice and say I wasn’t coming. But Alice rang me. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘No one will ask you anything. We’ll just talk about the book, nothing else.’ I said I simply didn’t have the energy either to come to her house, or if I did, to say a word. She said she would come and get me and as for talking, I didn’t need to, I could just listen. But I did say something.

  Alice came at seven o’clock, drove me back the short distance to her house and all she said herself was that she thought this month’s book was ‘unconvincing’, that she couldn’t wait to see what everyone else had made of it. It was almost a month since I’d read it myself – I read it immediately after the last meeting – and as Alice made this comment I was astonished to be aware of a protest stirring in my numb brain when we got to her house, where the other five were waiting. The discussion began with Alice repeating her remark and all except Shirley seemed to agree with her. I found myself looking encouragingly at Shirley – she is very shy and finds it hard to argue – but she just mumbled that she’d liked it. ‘But did you understand it?’ Alice demanded, and that was when I spoke. My voice croaked, as though I hadn’t used it for a long time. The book was Carol Shield’s Unless. I said I couldn’t believe the novel had seemed unconvincing to Alice, or that it was difficult to understand. It was about a mother’s anguish for a daughter who had separated herself from her family in search of what she thought of as ‘goodness’. What was there to understand about that? I said if my daughters – and then I stopped. I corrected myself. I said if my daughter … but then I couldn’t continue. Alice jumped in with some platitude but I found I wanted to continue. I blurted out, ‘the pain’ and stopped again, and then gathered my courage and said I thought the mother’s pain was so well described. I quoted a bit I remembered about her head being a ringing vessel of pain, and another bit about how she tried to dodge sadness with deliberate manoeuvres, and how she had endless dialogues with herself in her head. I said this had impressed me when I read it, but later, when it was over – that’s all I said, ‘when it was over’ (they might have thought I meant the book) – I’d remembered all this and felt a kind of relief that the way I felt, in different but similar circumstances, had been so accurately expressed.

  There was silence when I finished, and a lot of uncomfortable shifting about on chairs, then someone, Anita, I think, said she had liked the part about cleaning, about what a comfort it was to clean the house thoroughly when one was distraught, and a discussion on this followed, but I wasn’t listening. I was recalling another bit in the novel, about the narrator and her husband still having sex in the midst of their grief, about how they cried afterwards, but how they still fitted (I think that was the word) and lived in each other’s shelter. Don and I didn’t.

  *

  Lola was still there. Turning round as the last parent left with their child, at the end of school today, I realised Lola was still in the classroom, standing quite still beside the model of a castle Jeremy’s been making with them. She didn’t seem alarmed, not yet, and I was careful not to seem alarmed myself, though I was. Lola’s mother is almost always the first parent waiting outside the door. I see her face peering in as early as the beginning of story time. She has never been late. It was already quarter to four, a full fifteen minutes after end of school, and even the playground outside had almost emptied. Well, Lola, I said, I expect Mummy has got held up. You can help me sharpen the pencils till she gets here. All the children love sharpening pencils in the little machine we have, most of them turning the handle so hard they break the points off, but I knew Lola was careful and would concentrate beautifully. I sent Jeremy off to the office to check if there had been a message and I busied myself sorting out books, chatting to Lola as I did so, praising how well she was doing. There had been no message. The school secretary had rung Ms Adams and there was no reply. She’d also rung the neighbour, down as stand-by in emergencies. No reply from her either.

  I let Jeremy go and when she’d finished the pencils asked Lola which book she’d like me to read to her while we waited. She picked an illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows but I could tell from almost the beginning that she wasn’t really listening. ‘Where’s my mummy?’ she asked, and the first signs of anxiety appeared in her trembling voice. I sat her on my knee and said I was sure her mummy would be here soon, but by 4.30 the pretence wasn’t fooling her. She began to cry, softly. I tried, gently, to ask her some obvious questions, but this agitated her further. She had no idea where her mother might be. No, she hadn’t said anything that morning about going anywhere. No, she hadn’t seemed ill. So now there was a real problem. The usual system in these cases was to give it an hour and during that time try to contact all available numbers, which had been done, and then ring the social workers, which had also been done. They would place the child in a foster home for the night if necessary. I was not having Lola subjected to that. I knew perfectly well that in no circumstances is a teacher allowed to take a child home but in this case I was prepared to flout regulations and take the consequences.

  I knew that Margot was not in school that day, and that the secretary would not challenge me. I told her to give my address and phone number to Lola’s mother when she turned up, and said I’d ring the social worker back myself in a couple of hours if she didn’t. I took full responsibility.

  I tried to turn going
home with me into an adventure but by then Lola was frightened, and the hurried conversation between the secretary and me hadn’t helped reassure her. I held her hand tightly as we left the school and talked to her about the jacket she was wearing and how much I liked it and asked where her mother had bought it and was pink her favourite colour, and she trotted along beside me, giving little hiccups occasionally as she tried, I guessed, to stop crying. Once in my flat I poured her some juice and found some biscuits, and she accepted both but wouldn’t take her jacket off. I sat with her, holding her close, and we watched the end of Blue Peter. I was already wondering if the social worker would let me keep her for the night. She could sleep in my spare room. I knew they wouldn’t approve of her sleeping with me, in my bed, though it would have been comforting for her to be with someone. She was a distressed five-year-old little girl who had never, I was sure, been apart from her devoted mother for a single night in her life. When it grew dark, she was bound to get more frightened.

  I asked her what she liked best for supper. She said she and her mum had tea. They had beans on toast or boiled egg or sometimes chicken or ham sandwiches. I made chicken sandwiches but she wouldn’t touch them, just fingered them suspiciously and left them, shooting worried looks at me. I suggested toast, and she nodded, and when I brought it, she ate it all. Her jacket was still firmly buttoned up to the neck, though my flat was warm, but she seemed to regard taking it off as some kind of defeat – she had at all costs to believe her mother was about to come. Putting her to bed was never going to work, and so I settled her down on the sofa, her head on a cushion over my lap, and as I read to her she gradually nodded off. I didn’t dare move. I sat there, stroking Lola’s hair, listening to her breathing. It was so quiet and I felt as though something had loosened inside me. I was content. This would not last, but for the moment I was doing what I liked best, watching over a sleeping child, even though soon she would be taken away from me, and there might be upsetting reasons for it and unhappy consequences for her.