Over

by Margaret Forster

  Don got tired of it. ‘He isn’t a baby,’ he said. ‘He’s fifteen now, nearly sixteen, old enough to appreciate what we’re going through.’ Another time he asked if I’d seen Finn cry – this was one evening, when Finn was on the phone to a friend and laughing hysterically – and I said that, yes, I had, and I didn’t want to see it again. I wanted him to laugh. I wanted him to be noisy, and crash around. I wanted him to ignore our misery. It was vital to me that he should be his usual self. ‘Well,’ said Don, ‘it gets on my nerves.’ That was obvious. Every time Finn tore through the house, taking the stairs two at a time, whistling as he went, banging the doors of every room he went in or out of, Don winced. He’d always winced, but indulgently. Now he did it with real resentment and pain. ‘How can he?’ he kept saying. I said how could he not? Why should he creep around, whispering, all this time afterwards? This was his home, he had his own life to lead. I asked why it didn’t make him glad to see Finn so normal, because it made me very glad and relieved indeed.

  ‘Heard from Dad?’ Finn asked, before he left. He said it casually, as he said most things. I told him about Don’s visit, and that he’d asked for his new mobile number. ‘He wants to call you, and to see you,’ I said. Finn smiled, but it wasn’t his usual open smile – more a rueful expression, half-apologetic. ‘Has he finished his investigations?’ he asked, stressing the last word satirically. I said I didn’t think so, but I hadn’t inquired. ‘I just don’t want to get into any more arguments,’ Finn said. ‘He’s only got one topic, banging on and on, and it’s over two years now, it does my head in.’ I said it did mine in too. ‘You’re not like that, Mum,’ Finn said. ‘You’ve got over it, why can’t he?’

  I just shook my head. We had a little more chat, and then he was off, with a kiss and a hug. It amused me to smell the aftershave lotion. I must e-mail Molly and tell her. But when he’d clattered off down the stairs and I’d gone back into my flat, I felt I’d somehow betrayed Don. I should have corrected Finn. I should have pointed out that I had not ‘got over it’ any more than his father had. I simply hide my feelings better. Maybe, it occurred to me, I was offended that Finn thought I’d ‘got over it’, whereas Don hadn’t. Did he tell his friends that ‘Mum’s fine, she’s happy, she’s got over it ages ago’? I didn’t want to think that he did. Don and I are not in a competition to see who suffers most, who cares most, who is scarred most but, nevertheless, I don’t want to be outranked.

  5

  AFTERWARDS, SO MANY people told us that what we needed to do was ‘get right away’. But we didn’t take their advice. Apart from that trip Don and I made to Holland, to the place where the accident happened, we all stayed at home. It seemed safer. We hid. We holed up, until Christmas. I wonder every day whether getting ‘right away’ almost immediately afterwards might indeed have helped. If we had had the energy, the courage, to try it.

  But now was the right time to come here, when I’m not afraid to take pleasure. I can sit on this balcony, a wooden affair on the top half of a little house in the grounds of our hotel, and look out to sea and I am not overwhelmed by the memory of another sea. The vast expanse of blue water looks entirely benign. Soon, I will go and swim in it and then I will walk the white sand and pick shells. Everything tragic and ugly is a million miles away. I don’t even feel guilty about enjoying myself. But it’s true that I am bothered, all the same, by fleeting images of Don. I would rather that Don, the old Don, were with me, and not Lynne. Then, if that Don were here, everything really would be as happy as it is ever again going to be.

  Lynne is an irritant. That is an unkind, ungrateful thing to say, but I am only saying it here, to myself. It is years and years since I was with Lynne for more than a day or two and I’d forgotten how annoying she can be. She is so bossy. The moment we arrived, she had our time mapped out without consulting me. I just go along with her decisions. For example, Lynne says it is much too hot to be outside between noon and three o’clock, and so she makes me retire with her to rest, if not sleep, in our room. ‘Be sensible, Lou,’ she says, and I obediently am.

  But I don’t sleep. I think of Don. I think of the times we left the children with Judith and indulged ourselves. Four times in twenty-odd years, and each of those holidays was memorable. We would have a siesta after lunch. I can see those hotel rooms now, the shutters closed, the blazing sun struggling to pierce them, coming in through the slits and making patterns on the tiled floors. I can see the bed, festooned with mosquito nets hanging from a hook. I can see Don slipping out of his shorts and coming towards me as I lie on the bed, half drunk, arms behind my head. I can especially remember afterwards, Don instantly asleep, myself drifting in and out of consciousness, hearing the faint lap of the waves outside. Siestas were like that, it was what they were for.

  That’s a long time ago. I lie on my bed, with Lynne snoring gently on hers, and think how very long ago. Eight years since the last time we went away like that and enjoyed siestas. Since Miranda’s death, nothing. No lovemaking. No sex. It was unthinkable, afterwards. It is different for others, I’m told. Extreme grief brings couples closer together. They find relief in sex, it comforts them as it did in that novel, Unless. Through it, they can express what can’t be expressed in any other way. But we couldn’t. Often, I wanted Don to hold me, cuddle me, wrap me in his arms, but he couldn’t seem to manage to do it. I would go towards him, my own arms half lifted, my expression, I expect, pleading, and he would do his best. He would hold me, but awkwardly, with distaste, it seemed to me. He would even murmur an apology before breaking away. And I understood, or thought I did. He was afraid of breaking down completely and he felt he could not afford to do so. But maybe that wasn’t it at all.

  I waited. Time passed. A veneer of normality returned, but not in the bedroom. I thought perhaps it was up to me to approach him, and I did, trying to act as I used to, trying to be loving, but he flinched every time I touched him. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I just can’t, not yet.’ And then the next bit – ‘I don’t know how you …’ and then he’d stop. I’d finish his sentence for him. ‘You don’t know how I can want to make love, that’s it, isn’t it? You think it’s somehow indecent, because of …’ and he’d stop me. He’d say no, that of course he didn’t, but that it was about being too unhappy, too wretched, to take any kind of pleasure. Once his investigations were finished, once the culprit had been brought to justice, then his body wouldn’t feel so dead.

  I told no one about this. Who could I tell? Not Molly or Finn. Not Judith. Not any of my women friends, though once I almost confided in Ruth. I thought that I must just be patient. I didn’t see how Don’s normal nature could not in the end reassert itself. I never for one moment thought of urging him to see a therapist – he would be appalled at the idea, anyway – and I thought only briefly of consulting one myself. Embarrassment stopped me, and also a slight feeling of shame, which I couldn’t understand – why should I feel ashamed? I couldn’t bring myself to go to our GP and request help and see the pity in her eyes. Or maybe something else.

  I didn’t need sex. I told myself that very firmly. It was not important. I needed love. I needed Don to love me, and I felt he still did but that the feeling was dammed up inside him and I didn’t know what it would take to release it. When he was ready I’d be there. But it didn’t work out like that. After a little over a year, he said he thought we’d both sleep better in separate bedrooms. So he moved out. He moved into the tiny box-room next to his study, and there he stayed until the house was sold.

  I didn’t need sex. I don’t need it. But I’m reminded of it here, and the loss is there. It is painful.

  *

  Lynne sunbathes seriously. She is on the beach by ten o’clock, flat on her back on a comfortable lounger facing the sun, a book at the ready, together with a cold drink. She is blissfully content. At midday, she suggests that we go for a rum punch to the hotel’s beach bar, and I agree. It’s an attractive spot, circular, with rattan chairs all round. There are usual
ly a few other guests there, to whom Lynne likes to chat, very graciously. She likes being asked, as she invariably is, where she lives and what she does. I don’t say anything. There comes a point when she does the talking for me – ‘This is my friend Louise, she’s a teacher too.’ I see people looking at our wedding rings, and wondering. Lynne deals with that. ‘We’re on a girls’ holiday,’ she tells them, ‘getting away from everyone.’ Inevitably, someone asks about children. It’s when Lynne says that I have two, both grown up, that the test arrives.

  I can keep quiet, which is what I’ve usually been doing anyway, or I can contradict her. The contradiction would not be accurate, of course, because Lynne is correct, I do ‘have’ two children. There is no need to volunteer the information that I once had three. If I do that, I have to say one is now dead. And that will lead to more questions which I don’t want to answer. So why provoke a situation I dread? Molly has learned how to do it swiftly. She told me that when she’s asked if she has any siblings she always says immediately that she is a twin and that Miranda was killed in an accident when she was eighteen. She is ready for the ‘how awful, what happened?’ and she gets it over in two or three sentences. Finn doesn’t do that. I’ve heard him being asked the same question and he just says he has a sister. Finished.

  But my heart beats wildly, even now. I don’t want to name Miranda or say she is dead and yet I feel that if I don’t I am denying her. Talking about her, and her death, is too intimate. Why should I share this still excruciatingly painful knowledge with strangers? I don’t want to see their curiosity or their concern, or embarrassment. I don’t want to hear their eagerness for details. What do I want, then, if I bring Miranda into conversation? Not sympathy, surely not. I’ve had plenty of that. Yet there is always this need to give my dead daughter recognition and I struggle with it. I’ve tried out the sort of response Molly gives but I can’t manage, as she can, to be brisk and matter-of-fact. I blurt out that my other daughter was killed and then I can’t go on, and whoever I am telling this to is embarrassed for me.

  At the beach bar today there was an elderly woman, on her own, newly arrived. She smiled, we smiled back, ordered drinks, Lynne introduced us. She is called Florence, this woman, Florence Hart, and she told us straightaway that she has just been widowed and that this is her first holiday on her own and that it had been very hard, making the decision to come. ‘I don’t like the idea of dining on my own,’ she said. And, of course, Lynne then invited her to join us, without consulting me. She was right to do so. It was kind. But I’d already realised that Florence was garrulous and I didn’t know if I wanted to have to listen to her every evening. When she returned home to Yorkshire she was going to go and live with her daughter but wasn’t sure that she’d be happy there. ‘I don’t get on with Lorraine the way I did with Karen, but Karen died. She was killed in a car accident when she was twenty …’

  I left them. I didn’t want to hear about Karen or her fatal accident. I am beginning to agree with Don. I don’t want to hear about other people’s tragedies. I don’t want to empathise, to say I know how they feel. Even if I think that I do.

  *

  Lynne is as tired of Florence as I am. Two dinners have been enough. On and on Florence drones, about Herbert, her husband, about Lorraine and her family, and most of all about the dead Karen. I have absolutely forbidden Lynne to mention Miranda, and she has promised me she will not. When Florence said to us that I had no idea what it was like to lose a child, I said nothing. Lynne looked anxiously at me, and changed the subject adroitly. But it is a subject to which Florence likes to return again and again. She is obsessed with the dead Karen. She told us that she has kept her room exactly as it was when Karen died. She goes into it once a week and dusts everything.

  Lynne and I have agreed. This can’t go on. We will have to think of an excuse not to dine with Florence for the rest of our precious week. Being kind has its limits. I did not do this to people. I didn’t burden them with my misery. I didn’t – well. I was going to write that I didn’t spoil other people’s happy times by pushing my own unhappiness onto them. But is this true? My face may have been enough of a dampener, for the first year afterwards at least. I didn’t have to say anything. My expression, I suspect, was sufficient. But I couldn’t help that.

  But I will not share a table again with Florence and if she is at the beach bar I will not go.

  *

  We wrote and posted postcards today – we’ll be back home before they arrive, but Lynne insisted. All part of the holiday, she said – and so we sat and diligently scribbled messages.

  I still have Miranda’s last card. Posted the day before the accident. It arrived three days after she died. It was a joke. Once, when she was young and on a school trip she sent a card saying, ‘I am in Scotland.’ That was all. We teased her ever after for only telling us the one thing we knew anyway. Her last card said, ‘I am not going to tell you where I am but I am having a brill time, weather fab, company ditto.’ She sent Molly one too, poste restante to Nice, and Finn, and Judith. Finn wouldn’t read his. I tried to hand it to him but he saw the writing and shook his head. ‘Morbid,’ he said, ‘tear it up.’ But, of course, I didn’t. One of Molly’s friends collected her mail in Nice and sent Miranda’s card on. It was in a code they’d invented and Molly wouldn’t tell me what it said. She said it was just cheeky stuff about Alex. I think she’s kept it, though.

  *

  We sat on our balcony late last night, drinking white wine The tree frogs were croaking lustily and we could just faintly hear the sea hissing over the sand. We’d eaten and drunk well, without Florence (who providentially has a new victim, an elderly man). I was half asleep when Lynne spoke, very quietly. It was a question. ‘Happy?’ she asked. I didn’t reply, but I knew that Lynne would just keep on and on until I did, so I said that at this moment I did feel happy. ‘And you,’ I said, in a mocking tone, ‘are you happy, Lynne?’ She shocked me by saying that no, she was not.

  To hear Lynne state that she was not happy made me uncomfortable. Stupidly, insultingly, I tried to lighten the atmosphere, which had suddenly become tense and jumpy. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said, ‘who could not be happy after all this wine we’ve drunk – have some more.’ She was silent and I felt ashamed. ‘Sorry,’ I said. Silence again. I couldn’t see her clearly – the candlelight was meagre and we had put the lights out in our room behind us – but I leaned forward and peered at her in the gloom and was alarmed to see what might be a tear running down her cheek. Even as I saw it, she had brushed it away.

  ‘Lynne,’ I said, ‘tell me.’ She sniffed, and then gave a little laugh, a characteristic Lynne laugh, self-deprecating, and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. It just keeps coming over me that I’m not happy. Something’s wrong. I don’t know what. Nothing serious. It’s probably hormones.’ Her voice was stronger, she wasn’t almost whispering any more. ‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘it’s because I couldn’t have children? Do you think all the pretending that I didn’t mind is catching up with me? Or is that fanciful?’ I said I thought it was fanciful.

  We sat there until after midnight. One by one the other lights went off and a deep darkness obliterated the outlines of the cottages on the far side of the garden. Every other night, the stars had been a sharp, glittering mass above us, but last night clouds hid them and there was no moon. The atmosphere suddenly felt a little sinister though we were perfectly safe. It was still very warm, but I found myself shivering slightly. I was sure that Lynne wanted to tell me more but that she couldn’t express whatever it was that she was feeling, and I wasn’t helping her.

  As a friend, I failed. She was the first to move. ‘Bed,’ she said, in her usual brisk tone of voice. I followed her inside. We shut the shutters. I was so glad to sleep.

  *

  Our last day. A nice little scene to start it. Florence emerged for breakfast, accompanied by her new friend. She gave us a regal wave, and then sat with her back to us. She was wearing a pair of vivid ora
nge Capri pants, revealing what are still very elegant ankles, and a white top zipped up to her neck, hiding her wrinkled chest. From behind, she could have been our age and not, as we knew she was, in her seventies. Her friend seemed in awe of her. She talked and talked and he listened and said not a word. He was rather distinguished himself – tall and lean and though his hair was white he had plenty of it.

  ‘Maybe a romance is on the cards,’ I murmured to Lynne. ‘Lucky Florence,’ she said. She looked wistful. ‘Lynne!’ I said, and then she did laugh. But was this what that late-night confession was about? Did Lynne yearn for a romance?

  Lying on our loungers that last morning, I took up what Lynne had said – it was odd, the way the bright sunlight made it easier than the dark night had done to become personal. I asked why she had seemed to envy the aged Florence a possible romance. At first, she was evasive but then, from behind the shelter of sunglasses and hat, she said, ‘I just want some excitement, that’s all. I never seem to have had any real excitement in my whole life.’ ‘But you haven’t had the wrong sort of excitement either,’ I said. She took her sunglasses off and looked at me. ‘You know I didn’t mean that, Lou,’ she said. ‘I just meant that everything in my life has been humdrum, predictable, no surprises, everything chugging along satisfactorily. If I’d had children …’ I didn’t take this up. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘children bring excitement all the time, don’t they? Life is never dull, watching them grow up, being involved in whatever they are doing.’ ‘I thought it was romance you wanted,’ I said, ‘that kind of excitement.’ She laughed and put her sunglasses on and lay down again.