Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

by Elizabeth Buchan

I believed him and searched the house from top to bottom, for Ianthe swore the jigsaw had been complete when she brought it over.

  I discovered the missing pieces, all right. If I had had my wits about me, it would have been the first place to look. The breastplate of the youth who was about to run from the battlefield and into myth was tucked under Sam’s pillow, along with a section of the olive tree that grew in the background.

  With a tray poised on his knee, Sam sat up in bed and made a small ceremony of dropping those two final bits into place. ‘I wish you could stay at home,’ he said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I shall will it not to be so.

  So I said, so I believed, with the hard confidence and ignorance of twenty-one. But it was wasted, for I had come up against something stronger than will. I had been beaten by biology.

  Deep in the rainforest, I took the plunge. Driven almost mad by hormones, fear and love, I cornered Hal after an evening meal eaten around the fire. ‘I am pregnant.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘I knew it.’ He opened them. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Keep it. There’s no question. It’s our baby.’ I felt a whisper of excitement, of tenderness. ‘Our baby, Hal.’

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s not the plan. I don’t want children.’

  It was dark and I could not see his face clearly. But I sensed that a stubborn, ruthless gleam would have sprung into the blue eyes while mine would be reflecting confusion and anger… yes, anger. ‘Well, we can’t ignore it. It’s not an overdraft or a headache.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for it.’

  ‘You’re being outrageous.’

  ‘Sure, I am. If being honest is outrageous.’

  ‘But it has happened.’ I reached out to touch him but he moved away. My hand dropped to my side.

  ‘Our plan was to work and travel.’

  ‘I know. I wanted to do that too, but plans change. They have to sometimes. We must make others.’

  He peered through the dusk at me for a long time, and it was as if he was saying, After all this time, we have not understood one another at all. ‘But I don’t wish to change my plans, Rose.’

  I could feel his rejection, almost taste it. Snippets from previous conversations rushed through my mind – a light-hearted allusion to ‘the glorious nomad mentality’ and his statement that ‘The best life, the only life, is unfettered’ – which had always persuaded me how intriguing Hal’s point of view was, how different he was.

  The implications sank in. ‘Hal, I imagined you would be horrified, angry perhaps, but that in the end you would say, “It’s not what I wanted, but we’ll deal with it.’”

  That hurt him and he hunkered down beside me. ‘Have I ever been dishonest with you? Have I promised you anything?’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t… I know I can’t. I’m not cut out… I need… No, I want to get on with the work I plan to do. Life is short, and I want to be free to concentrate on it. But I’m sorry, Rose, that this has happened.’

  I looked up at him. ‘We are responsible for a baby. It has no one else.’

  ‘Only if I accept responsibility.’

  The prospect of being alone with a baby made me panic, and I heard an ignorant, desperate stranger’s voice – mine – babbling. It wouldn’t make any difference, I argued, and the words poured out of me. It need not alter anything. Babies were hauled around in slings, left in cloakrooms, given to someone else to look after. A baby could be as unobtrusive, and as uneventful, as one wished it to be.

  He listened in silence. At last he stirred. ‘Even I know better.’

  I bent my head. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘We won’t talk about this again. I will deal with it.’

  Obviously it was not the end of the discussion, but there was only so much I could take. Anyway, I had to think.

  Hal got up to check the fire and to exchange a few words with the guard. I remained where I was. Sweat gathered under my arms and in the dip of my back. But inside I felt cold.

  We went to our hammocks in silence. That night, I heard Hal tossing and muttering in his sleep – then, and in the nights that followed, when I lay awake and faced the problem with which I had been presented.

  We were polite and solicitous, almost strangers. Ironically, I began to feel better, less sick, and accompanied Hal on the planned trips. It was the closest physically I had ever been to him, but it was the proximity of two people who had elected to be on either side of a divide.

  On the Monday of the third week, I woke from my customary uneasy sleep to a heavy cramp in the small of my back. Searching in my rucksack, I found the aspirins and tossed a couple of them down.

  During the day, the cramp transferred itself to my stomach. I took yet more aspirins and slogged on. That night, in desperation, I begged for a glass of brandy from the medicinal bottle in our equipment. Hal peered at me but, with the new politeness, did not inquire further. He said only, ‘Big day tomorrow.’ We were scheduled to travel up-river again. ‘Hope you’re up to it.’

  I squared up to him. ‘You’re being cruel.’

  ‘Yup,’ he agreed. ‘I am.’

  ‘Hal, it was a mistake.’

  ‘I’ve got the picture. And I am behaving badly. But we came out here to do something else. Let’s do it. Then think.’ He softened a little. ‘Just let me get used to it, Rose.’

  When it was time to leave, it was clear that I was incapable of swinging out of my hammock, let alone paddling up-river.

  Hal bent over the hammock where I lay, my face screwed up with discomfort. His drawl seemed more pronounced. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  I tried to sit up but failed. ‘Hal, do you think there’s somewhere I can lie down properly? I need firm ground under me.’

  He stroked my face and, for a minute or two, we were back to where we had been. ‘I’ll see what we can do. Then we’d better get you out of here.’

  ‘I might be losing it,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to, Hal. It has a right to live.’

  To his credit, Hal did not reply.

  He and the guides set about constructing a rough pallet and they laid me on it. Hal tried to radio Quetzl but a tropical storm raging in the area made reception impossible, and by the time he got through, all the available planes had been commandeered. He managed to consult a doctor, who thought that if I rested there was a chance that I could stave off a threatened miscarriage. He gave Hal some basic instructions and advised him to get me down to Quetzl as soon as possible. What, he asked Hal, was I doing in the rainforest pregnant? The worst bit was that he forbade me to take any more aspirin.

  Hal bent over me on the pallet. I shifted and felt sweat inch down my legs to the blood-coloured mud floor. ‘Any better?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Poor Rose.’

  I had the strangest sensation that my body was rotting. ‘Do I smell?’

  ‘No.’ His lips brushed at my wet cheek. ‘You look beautiful.’

  ‘Light’s bad,’ I said.

  Hal postponed the longer trip up-river, but I persuaded him to make an alternative day trek to check out a reported sighting of the Indians. To do him justice, Hal was reluctant, but I knew the form and I made him go. ‘I can’t move yet but I’m not in any danger so go.’

  He took my hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  It seemed stupid to be angry and distant. ‘You are my joy, Hal.’ He caught his breath audibly. ‘You give me the profoundest joy, the sharpest and the tenderest feelings and there are times… when I think we’re merged with each other. I just want you to know that.’

  He stared down at me for a long time. Then, leaving food and water within reach, he briefed the porter who remained to stand guard. Through the opening in the hut I watched him load up and move off.

  The day crawled by. I fixed my gaze on a tree framed in the doorway. Its leaves were palmate and shiny, and the bark was fretworked by holes, which revealed flesh coloured pulp. Too late. It reminded me of the dead man in the river.


  I studied the map. It was almost noon, and Hal was scheduled to have reached the point where the river curved back on itself, but you could never be sure in the rainforest. At two o’clock he would be heading back.

  The map dropped on to the mud floor.

  The porter looked in, went away. On the dot, tropical rain drove spears into the clearing then vanished. The leaves steamed with moisture and figures materialized through the steam in the clearing – singing, dancing Yanomami, their feet beating the forest floor into blood-coloured mud. I woke. I dreamt. I shifted from one side to the other.

  A few hours later, the pain returned with sickening force and then it was all over.

  In the descending dark, I fought against my body, which I was unable to control. No angels, no lit candles here.

  I must have cried out, for the porter sidled into the hut. He took one look at me and came back with a drink. It tasted disgusting but I was past caring.

  As it grew darker, I drifted in and out of sleep. I was drenched in sweat and wet with blood. There was nothing, no one, for my slippery hands to hang on to, nothing except my loss. Nothing except the dark, beating heart of the jungle.

  It was not enough that Hal was my profoundest joy. There were other important things in life. I wanted the responsibilities that Hal did not. Above all, I wanted to keep my children. That was my freedom – a little shaky perhaps, a little circumscribed, but possible. My choices were as simple as Hal’s, but different.

  There was no point in looking for Hal. Not now, not ever. He was set on his path, and I did not wish to spend my life loving and waiting and then, as time crawled by, just waiting. Neither was I going to trek along jungle paths and paddle down rivers with this body and its biological design flaw.

  The timing was wrong.

  I woke with a start as Hal came into the hut, carrying a pot of water. He was very excited. ‘Rose! We saw them and they stayed long enough to make contact. I got some fantastic shots. It was a good trip, the best trip. Couple of blisters on my feet, which I must see to, but, first, I’m going to wash you. It was like nothing I’ve done before, it was…’ He peeled back the cotton sleeping-bag. Our eyes met.

  He tried so hard not to let anything show. But the sudden lightening of the gentian eyes told me how deeply the shadows of what might have been had frightened him.

  ‘Let me wash you, Rose?’

  God knows how, but Hal had managed to heat the water. How I had craved the ordinariness of warm water. Carefully, tenderly, he sponged me down and, in my fever state, I imagined that the floor was running red. Without hiding place, without defence, I allowed him to do this for me while I flinched at being so exposed, so female.

  Hal kept talking, softly, sweetly: ‘I’m paying special attention to your feet because feet are important. If they don’t feel comfortable, nothing does. That is the first law of the traveller.’ He prised open the spaces between my toes, the water dripped through them and then he dried them. ‘Happy feet?’

  ‘My feet are very happy, thank you.’

  He made me roll over on to my stomach and, miraculously, I began to feel clean. He sponged under my arms. ‘If you need more padding, I’ll tear up a shirt.’

  He washed me clean and then he kissed me. Weak, frightened and desperate with love, I returned the kiss, but it was a Judas kiss.

  A week later, we flew back to Quetzl in the alarming plane and checked into the hotel by the airport.

  During the night, I told Hal that I was leaving him, because I loved him, loved him so much that I could not bear us to destroy each other. ‘I want peace, stability, a family,’ I told him. ‘Sooner or later the issues would have had to be dealt with, and we might as well get it over and done with.’

  Hal was facing me on the pillow and he turned away. He said nothing to change my mind. I had known he wouldn’t. He sighed and I tugged at his shoulder to make him turn back. With a shock, I saw that he was crying. ‘I don’t want what you have described,’ he said, ‘but that makes it even harder.’

  In the hotel room the next morning, I woke late. Hot sun slatted into the room and the cheap bed-covering was rough and grimy.

  Hal and his rucksack had vanished.

  I lay and pictured him walking through the close, crowded streets, stopping for a coffee to clear his head, or to sift through his fingers a pinch of a bright-coloured spice on a stall. Already he would be rebuilding the present, talking of the future, anticipating the journey back into the rainforest. He and I knew that he had been released from years of compromise, disagreement, the spectre of me waiting.

  On the way to the airport I asked the taxi driver to stop. I got out of the car. The heat blasted me like a drill, and the noise and smells slapped my senses. The sky was a vicious, burning, gun-metal grey. Lining the sides of the road were piles of rubbish, figures picking through them, digging with bare hands.

  I walked to the nearest and placed my boots on it. Before two seconds had elapsed, someone darted down the heap and seized them.

  I got back into the taxi. The town’s straggle slipped away, to be replaced by fields and scrub. I did not look back.

  Early on in our affair, Hal had lectured me that everyone must travel for it widened the horizon. Uncritical with love, I agreed.

  He had been wrong, and how surprised he would have been to be told that. Travel narrowed the horizon. (I think Bernard Shaw wrote that.)

  On the flight home, I met Nathan.

  Nathan had been fascinated by the story. ‘Why,’ he wanted to know, ‘if you loved the wretched man, did you leave him?’

  I tried to explain about not having the courage to face dead bodies in the jungle or, rather, what they represented. Neither did I wish to be the one who waited at home. I didn’t tell him that I loved Hal so much that, in the end, I did not trust that love.

  ‘But nothing would stop me marrying you,’ Nathan plunged his hands into his pockets, ‘now that I’ve met you. I wouldn’t care if you lived up a tree.’

  ‘Perhaps I haven’t explained well enough,’ I said, and I probably had not, for the subject was unbearably painful to me and muddled.

  If Vee or Mazarine had asked me how it felt to meet Hal again, I think I would have replied, ‘Inevitable.’

  In one sense Nathan had been right, but not in the way he had feared. Once acquired, the habit of someone does not go away entirely. It goes underground. You may not see them again, or you may, but they are there in situ.

  The days were rolling by, and summer was now well advanced. I was still not sleeping well although I was not unhappy, just restless from the aftermath of a great battle to survive that had been waged in me. One hot night I pushed open the french windows and stepped into the mysterious night world of the city.

  The air was like velvet, with just a hint of chill. A fox barked three or four gardens up the terrace, and stopped when it scented me. Leaving a tracing of my bare feet in the dew, I trod over the lawn. Cream and white roses glimmered like lamps through the watery dark. In the shadow, I could just make out the dark smudge of curved leaf scimitars and the lax sprawl of the plants.

  I was bathed in sweat and my heart pounded, for I was remembering the excitement and strangeness of the rainforest. When I reached the fountain, I sat down on its brick lip. There was a tiny splash. In Parsley’s absence, a toad had taken up residence. I had seen it quite a few times. I do not know how long I sat there, but I must have been very still for the toad came creeping out of the water.

  Would I have chosen differently in this small history of mine? I do not think so. Roses are such domesticated flowers, Ianthe always said. Remember that.

  The light was growing stronger. I got up, stretched and sniffed with pleasure at the cool night scents.

  Lily-beetle watch time. Best done in a nightdress, I found. The Madonnas grew in a group of three pots and I bent down to inspect their foliage. Lily beetles have an amazing capacity to multiply and they were there, tucked up, shiny-backed terrorists with jaws like steel
intent on destroying the lily’s beauty.

  I picked one up between finger and thumb. This one was young, glossy and greedy. A Minty of a beetle that could not help stealing and plundering because it knew no better. Squeamish gardeners are no use and, having been greenly indoctrinated, I did not use sprays. For the good of the world, I employed cruder methods. With only a tiny regret, I dropped the young, glossy, thieving lily beetle on to the stone and crushed it.

  I searched for another.

  Mazarine had been correct when she argued that we must experience pain, otherwise delight will never have its proper savour, nor pleasure its sweetness, nor love its bittersweet ache – which is what I had wanted from that love’s foreign convulsive grip.

  But I had learnt not to confuse my experience with Hal with the everyday. Real life was different. It was home territory. Having skimmed off a layer of fantasy and yearning, I had been left free to light on moments of pleasure, happiness and affection sandwiched between the routines and the habits. No, looking back, I had sought and accepted the torment and the anguish of Hal in order to remember and store the tenderness, the profound joy, the awe at being so shaken by the exquisiteness of passion.

  Of course, I had carried some of those memories, my knowledge, with me to Nathan. That was how it worked.

  Meeting Hal again had reminded me.

  Chapter Twenty

  My energy returned. I cleaned Lakey Street from top to bottom. I went through my desk on the landing and threw out every bit of unnecessary paper. I climbed into the attic and sorted through a suitcase of my old clothes, scooping up the too-short skirt, the little knitted dress that had to be worn without a bra, the figure-hugging blouse – clothes that belonged to the past – carried them out to the car and drove them to the charity shop.

  I even ventured into the garden with the intention of doing something and, after a few hours, an old pleasure reclaimed me. The rabbit-out-of-a-hat magic. I was at home here, and the rules did not change. It was too late in the season to do any serious repair work on the uncared-for plants but this was reassuring: ‘It’s good to know you’re needed,’ I informed Vee, ‘even if it is the garden.’