Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  But he was there, with her, the three of them togeth…

  CHAPTER 51

  Despite Paul’s presence beside her, Chala slept badly that night. She woke up time and time again, dreaming of waterfalls and storms and pools of blood – and each time she put her hand between her legs to test for the telltale sign, she could feel only a slight moistness. She forced herself to refrain from unnecessary trips to the bathroom to scrutinise the sanitary towel she had put on before she went to sleep.

  When she woke up and saw with relief that light was pouring through the chink in the curtains, Paul was still fast asleep beside her. She was desperate for the loo and yet now that it was here she wanted to delay the moment of truth, the proof on her sanitary towel of whether the danger was over or not. The feeling was becoming familiar: first the pregnancy test, then the letter, now this. But this time was different; this time there was no female friend in the next room, but a man in her bed who had chosen a future with her.

  ‘Paul,’ she shook him very gently.

  ‘What?!’ He jumped out of sleep into total irritated wakefulness and then realised where he was and said more slowly, ‘What is it?’

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom to check. I thought you would want to be awake when I did it.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, of course. Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, you wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She was back quickly. Paul looked expectantly at her, reminding her momentarily of Femke’s dog, Tek Tek.

  ‘No blood.’ She had tears streaming down her face, still afraid to hope for too much.

  ‘No blood!’ He looked happy. ‘Is it twenty-four hours yet? What do we do now?’

  ‘Just about. I think we ring the nurse.’

  * * *

  ‘You know I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if you lost it. I mean I know you would have been devastated, but I didn’t really know how I’d feel. Now I know that I want it too.’

  ‘Oh Paul, that means so much to me.’ But Rosie still lurked on the sidelines of her consciousness. ‘It’s not over yet, though. I’m so scared to hope. Let’s wait and see what the scan says.’ Chala moved with deliberate, careful steps as if she might break.

  They followed the nurse into a room full of apparatus and Chala went behind a curtain to put on the green cotton robe, while the nurse attempted small talk with a monosyllabic Paul. By the time Chala was in position, the doctor was with them, talking them through the procedure, trying to calm their nerves with the coolness of her voice. Chala reached out for Paul. He took her hand in his and she noticed he was sweating. Both of them watched the weird, slippery black and white screen as the doctor moved across Chala’s bare stomach. She tried desperately to breathe normally. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The quiet, unnecessary mantra she had grown up with washed against the surface of her consciousness now as she waited and waited for the doctor to speak. At last she did and Paul’s hand tightened round Chala’s.

  ‘I think it’s going to be OK. Looks to me like you’ve got a perfectly healthy little baby growing in there.’

  For once, the artist in Paul was totally absent. There were unashamed tears in his eyes as he squeezed Chala’s hand again.

  ‘Do you want to know the sex?’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘I do if you do.’

  ‘I do.’ She said it through tears, laughing at the echo of their wedding vows.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ the doctor told them.

  ‘But of course,’ Paul laughed.

  ‘I knew it. I knew it.’ They were both laughing now.

  ‘What do you want to call it – I mean her? Do you know already?’ It didn’t occur to Paul that it might still be a little early to speak of names; it just didn’t fit into his worldview.

  ‘I don’t know, I—’

  ‘Do you want to call her Emma?’ Neither of them noticed that the doctor had quietly slipped away.

  Chala thought hard for a second, appreciating Paul’s gesture. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, not Emma. I want her to have her own name and her own fresh chance in life. Something vivid and colourful, for the daughter of a painter.’

  ‘Violet? Rose? Amber?’ he said playfully.

  ‘Fuck off!’ she laughed back.

  ‘How about Indigo?’ More serious now.

  ‘Maybe. I’m not sure. Everyone would call her Indi, wouldn’t they? Actually, that’s nice. I like it. Let’s just call her Indi. What do you think?’

  ‘Indi it is.’

  Paul stroked her face with his free hand and kissed her on the lips and Chala felt as if she were flying – away from her past, away from the yellow room, into a blue sky.

  On the horizon of her being, her observer sat, looking a little like a cloth doll with unblinking eyes, quietly nonchalant and waiting for her future.

  EPILOGUE

  He felt the heavy ache behind his eyes before he opened them. Then a thought struck him and he opened them quickly and forced himself to focus on the bed beside him. There was no one there. Thank God for that. He knew through the pain that it would have solved nothing.

  Paul pulled himself slowly to a sitting position, measuring the strength of his hangover, feeling the rasp at the back of his throat. Vague images of a woman in his arms in a dingy salsa bar played in his head, breasts demanding his attention through flimsy cloth that could not hide her nipples. He had no recollection of how he’d got back, how he’d become separated from her. When he had seen her at the bar he had thought she was pretty – that he remembered – but when he got close the thick smear of too much lipstick had kept drawing his attention, vaguely disgusting him. He had wanted to wipe it off – that, too, he remembered – but it had stayed there in all its smudgy redness and the lure of her breasts on the dance floor was not enough to make it go away. In the end, it was probably her lipstick that had stopped him bringing her back. A sobering thought.

  He looked at his watch and realised with more relief that it was too late for breakfast at the B & B. At least he’d be saved from the solicitous looks of the old dears here who seemed to think that he had been sent from heaven for them to mother, but, Jesus, he needed a serious fried breakfast now. Walter’s Café, he thought. Walter’s Café will save me. He forced himself to brave the lukewarm shower and cold water on his face before taking on the already wintry sea air.

  We are never more aware of oxygen in the air than when we’re hungover, he thought. It was good to be hungover once in a while, something rare these days, something that reminded him of the heady early days of college, when he had been able to forget briefly the interminable pressure from his parents. He had succumbed, of course, like so many others, to their version of who he should be, following their instincts in his choice of career, even believing for a while that he fitted into the box they had bought for him. It was Chala who had broken the box into tiny pieces around him. She believed in him in a way that no one ever had before – in the artist cowering behind the lawyer.

  He moved slowly up the hill from the beach towards Walter’s Café and his thoughts dipped sluggishly back to the time he had first seen her. The fiery hair, the slight mismatch of her clothing, the coy flash of her eyes – physically, he had loved her instantly, wanted to place her on a cliff and paint her from every angle. But he had been wary at first. Because he was recently out of a relationship with a control freak and because of what he had learnt first from Claire and then Dan. ‘She’s trouble, that one. You can’t grow up with what happened to her and be OK. There’s darkness in her, it’s written all over her.’

  Maybe now he was paying the price. And yet he loved the darkness in her – that too had drawn him in. She didn’t just attract him, she interested him, at a level that no other girl had done. Of course his parents didn’t really go for her – she wasn’t ambitious enough for a start. They tried to hide it, but he could tell anyway and the knowledge was a sour taste in his mouth, until it eventually grew into the sweet taste of rebel
lion and he chucked in his job. She the pessimist and he the optimist, and yet she was the one who had given him the strength to be optimistic about turning his passion for art into his life.

  And now, just when it really looked as though it might turn into not just his life but also a living, she had shaken him to the core.

  ‘The works, please.’

  ‘Black pudding too?’

  ‘Yep, everything you’ve got.’ He needed strength. He watched the waitress’ bottom as she walked away from the table and felt grateful again that he had not slept with the girl in the lipstick last night. He took out his phone and registered with a mix of relief and disappointment that there were no messages or missed calls from Chala. He was surprised that she had stuck to her word about waiting for him to call.

  Why didn’t he really go away somewhere, call Dan, anyone, to take him away from this self-inflicted sentence? Not Dan, he could not have stood the told-you-so sympathy. Of all the people he might have spoken to – and there weren’t many, he realised in a flash of loneliness – the one he had felt most tempted to call in the first couple of days was Amanda. She knew Chala so well it would have been so easy to sit and talk to her, but he realised there would have been an uncomfortable edge of revenge in it too, and the bottom line was he couldn’t tell anyone until he’d worked out what to do, and then, depending on which way he decided to go, he might never be able to tell anyone anyway.

  ‘Here you are – that should sort you out!’ The waitress smirked as she laid the plate down in front of him.

  He smiled back at her, grateful and greedy to start. The mental swirl in his head relaxed as he fed the dulling ache behind his eyes. Then came coffee and he smiled again as if he had been brought a piece of heaven.

  ‘Heavy night, then?’ She laughed and her open mouth showed a perfect line of small white teeth.

  No lipstick, he thought. And then, what the hell am I thinking? Yet, she didn’t move, waiting for him to speak. There was no one else left in the café and the owner or manager sat crumpled behind a newspaper in the far corner by the till.

  ‘Would you ever have a baby with a man knowing it wasn’t his? Without even telling him?’ He looked her straight in the eyes. The look of shock was momentary and settled itself into thoughtfulness.

  ‘It depends,’ she said finally. ‘I might.’

  ‘Thanks for your honesty.’ He looked at her long and hard.

  Then she took a risk and he admired her for it. ‘I’m off when you’ve finished. Do you want to do something?’

  He looked at her again and she held his look, but he knew it was impossible. ‘In another life,’ he said, and she nodded and moved away slowly with a smile.

  In another life, he thought with stubborn irony, he would have been part of that statistic. Yeah, he had surfed the Internet like a sick child on the first night and come across a statistic that he had found staggering: one in twenty-five men believed a child was theirs when it wasn’t. But how many would knowingly have a child that wasn’t theirs? And what tiny proportion would choose to have a child that wasn’t theirs in secret? This was the choice that he couldn’t yet quite believe he was contemplating.

  He backed out of Walter’s Café with one last smile for the waitress and headed again for the open space of the beach. By now the first Saturday post-lunch dog-walkers were out with their little plastic bags. He walked and then sat and then walked again. He tried to think about cricket or football, but she had forced him into the thick black world of her own inner existence. Damn her. Who had she fucked? What had she been wearing? Did she come? The questions jabbed at him, catching him by surprise again and again, and he reeled, repelled by the detail that his brain painted for him against his will.

  He walked over the pebbles, then sat down again and stared at the sea. He was glad he hadn’t blown it before it was too late, hadn’t confronted Chala when she broke the news. Some deep sense of privacy and self-protection had kicked in straight away and hardened him, made him cold and distant. He had not processed this new reality yet, but he knew one thing – ignorance of the detail was the one thing that gave them a chance, gave him a chance.

  He sank back against the pebbles, closing his eyes, feeling the weak sunshine on his eyelids. He pictured the waitress wistfully and tried to undress her in his mind – more an exercise in distraction than anything else – but the moment he took off her clothes, she turned into Chala.

  In another li… He clung to the theme, as if it would hold some great revelation that would make his choice easier. In another life he would not have been hit in the balls by a cricket ball and accidentally discovered he had a genetic testicular abnormality that impeded the production of sperm. In another life his wife would have been by his side in A & E and shared the discovery, not off on some soul-searching, grief-stricken mission in another country. In another life he would have told her anyway on the phone or in an email, but he had needed to come to terms with it himself. He had wanted to tell her face to face if, or when, she came home. The irony struck again – just as she had waited to tell him face to face about being pregnant.

  Before the cricket accident, he had always hoped and believed that she would get over her aversion to having a baby one day. There was no rush. It was a private dream he had taken for granted, an unspecified vision of a future together. The cricket ball had knocked him sideways – ha! All of a sudden he was the one who would stop them having children and now, just as suddenly, that had sort of been given back to him. He looked at the sea and saw an opportunity to cheat destiny and bring up a child with the woman he loved – if he could just let go of one irrevocable fact.

  He started walking again, not knowing where he would go next, following his feet along the coastline, until he eventually found himself in the centre of Brighton on a busy Saturday afternoon. He wandered into a bookshop and dipped in and out of back covers in the science fiction and the crime sections until he felt bored and restless.

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ A male this time, not a female, with or without lipstick, tempting him to get back at the woman he loved.

  ‘No, not really.’ Then a thought struck him. ‘Do you have a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s book?’

  ‘You mean The Prophet?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  He paid for it and then ordered a coffee and unwrapped the book, feeling vaguely self-conscious and feminine. But he wanted to find the words again, the words he had spoken at their wedding without truly thinking about them. He had been swept along by her choice and yet she had come back to them time and time again – they really meant something to her – and now he wanted to find out what they really said. Spaces in their togetherness – that was the sound bite that had stuck and it sounded OK, but what did it really mean? Did it mean she had a right to fuck someone without telling him? Did it mean he had a right to consign her to unforgiven guilt for ever by not telling her about his own infertility? Hadn’t there already been enough guilt in her life? Did space really mean deception? Does the end justify the means?

  Fuck! He flicked through the pages and found the passage. He looked around briefly, self-conscious again, and then started reading against the mental backdrop of a cliff in Devon overlooking the sea.

  Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

  Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

  Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

  Give one another your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

  Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

  Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

  Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.

  For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

  And stand together yet not too near together:

  For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

  And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each
other’s shadow.

  Paul looked up slowly and stared indiscriminately at the book stacks beyond the coffee tables. His eyes stung. If Chala were sitting opposite him now, he would have told her that he must still be hungover, but she would have seen through him. She would have known that he was moved.

  It felt like a wave, a slow, powerful revelation between the lines of what he had just read. She did not know who the father was. She knew it could be someone else’s, but she also thought it could be his. She would have tortured herself over whether to tell him or not. If she had decided not to tell him, it was because what had happened was too meaningless to put their relationship at risk and because emotionally her commitment was to his baby. Her words had already said as much.

  Paul’s head felt suddenly very clear. If he had slept with the lipstick woman, it would have meant nothing. If he trusted Chala, he must trust the strength of her decision and decide upon his own with equal strength.

  Then why not be strong enough to bring it all out into the open and just deal with it and move on? Paul saw his own hall of mirrors painting in his head. The mirrors he had opened up inside himself bounced back at him and he knew that their message was true. Because you are not, they said simply. Not strong enough for that. Not strong enough to confront the details that would seem to confer meaning where there wasn’t any, not strong enough to unravel the private inner space of their lives in an attempt to make them more connected. Spaces in their togetherness. Yes. They had a chance this way, a real chan…

  Paul finished his coffee and walked into the street again, half- expecting the world to have changed around him. He could feel the decision gaining ground inside him. It was not yet made and yet he felt it pulling at him. The light was beginning to fail slowly in the sky, but he wanted to return to the sea.

  It was a soft grey-blue now, and calm in the late afternoon light. Did you really just walk into the sea, you old bastard? He realised with a pang that he would have liked to talk to Philip more than anyone. He would have valued Philip’s opinion. He felt sure – suddenly and obscurely – that Philip would have understood the decision he was taking himself towards.