Tell Me Where You Are

by Moira Forsyth

  It was nine o’clock when Kenny called and she realised with dismay that she had completely forgotten her promise to spend the evening with him. Full of apologies, she explained what had happened. ‘I’d come over now, but it’s quite late and I’m not long home.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Come round at the weekend. We should have a wee talk, A Ghraidh, for old times sake.’

  The Gaelic endearment, which she had always liked, made her feel guilty. Old times sake? What did he mean?

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll cook for you.’

  She hesitated, thinking of leaving Kate, Alec and Andrew together. ‘Look, are you at home tomorrow morning? Let me come then and I’ll tell you what’s going on.’

  ‘I’ll brew the coffee,’ he said. ‘Nice and strong. Eleven o’clock.’

  That was settled, then. No need for anxiety, but a niggling doubt lingered: for old times sake.

  Andrew called at ten. His bus would reach Inverness late in the afternoon – would she meet him? She would, and somehow on the way home she would manage to tell him his cousin was going to have a baby in September.

  Gillian was still in Aberdeen with her mother. They went to the hospital twice on Friday and again on Saturday, afternoon and evening. Her father was at his best in the afternoon, at the beginning of the visit. By the evening he seemed less coherent and lay silent. Gillian and her mother tried to keep some conversation going at first, then they too lapsed into silence. Spring bloomed in the pavement trees and in gardens; visitors brought lilies and tulips for the bedside vases, yellow and white and red. A soft air greeted them as they came out at half past eight on Saturday evening. Even the East coast breeze had fallen.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Gillian said as they reached the house. ‘I have to get a train back tomorrow. I’ll come up to the hospital for a while early in the afternoon, then I’ll get a taxi to the station.’

  ‘You’ve got your work, dear, I know that.’ Grace manoeuvred into the narrow driveway; after thirty years she still did this very slowly. Once she had scraped a car door on the gatepost and Jim’s reaction had convinced her only extreme caution would prevent it happening again.

  Gillian saw the evening stretch out in front of her. Not nine o’clock yet and nothing more to say about her father. Before she left, Frances had taken her aside.

  ‘If you find an opportunity please tell Mum about Kate. She had plenty to cope with when I arrived, but it looks as if Dad will be OK. She’s the best one to tell him.’

  Gillian had agreed she would try. It would certainly give them something to talk about. She often complained to Frances, ‘I’m stifled in that house, that’s why I hardly ever visit. And after a day, there’s nothing left to say.’ Frances did not understand, since she and her mother always had plenty to say to each other. Gillian supposed it must be having children made that difference, since they talked endlessly about the boys. Frances also had the sort of job her mother understood. Gillian didn’t know how anyone could be so interested in the squabbles and triumphs of a pack of little kids.

  Now there would be another child for them to discuss. She had a pang of jealousy she could not reason away. Imagine, she thought, as her mother went to make tea, Kate and I could have been pregnant together. What a family scandal that would have been. She began to laugh then found herself in tears instead. All through Kate’s pregnancy her own lost baby would float like a ghost beside her, forever amoeba like, unformed, with large head and tiny buds of limbs, its eyes closed, blind, unable to see the future it was never going to have. Oh, what have I done?

  ‘I couldn’t find that packet of chocolate digestives,’ Grace said, as she came in. ‘I’m sure I bought one with the shopping yesterday. I wonder where I put it?’

  Gillian rustled the paper into folds, looking away, then blew her nose.

  ‘You’re not starting a cold, I hope,’ her mother asked. ‘I always think these hospitals are full of germs.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Grace put the tray down. ‘Never mind, these coconut ones are nice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The biscuits.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Grace sat down with a sigh. ‘Mind, I’ve no appetite myself.’

  ‘No wonder, it’s been a pretty stressful few days,’ Gillian said, composed again.

  ‘These things come to us when we get older. He takes ill with it, though, being stuck in there. He’ll be better once he’s home.’

  ‘Nobody likes hospitals.’

  The conversation died. Grace picked up a coconut biscuit and nibbled a corner of it as if the taste might bring her appetite back, then left it on the arm of her chair.

  ‘Mum, I think I’d better tell you something.’

  ‘Oh aye, what’s that?’ She seemed polite rather than curious, putting on her glasses and reaching for the tapestry bag.

  ‘Frances was going to, but with Dad and everything, she felt she didn’t want to worry you.’

  This was more serious. Grace put the tapestry down again and looked at Grace over her glasses.

  ‘Is this about Susan?’

  So she told her. Like Frances, she found there was no way of dressing it up. Only one way to tell. She went on, clumsily explaining it had happened while Kate was still in Newcastle.

  ‘And Susan – was she at home?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘No word from her, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  Grace frowned. ‘I don’t know. Susan was always. …’ She seemed to shrug Susan off with a sigh. ‘Well, I hope they can do something for Kate. At least it’s much more straightforward these days.’

  With a shock, Gillian took in what her mother meant.

  ‘You mean an abortion? I wouldn’t have thought you’d approve of that.’

  ‘You didn’t go through the war.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The lasses I knew. The fellow would be off, back to his regiment, and there they’d be, in the family way. Sometimes the man was killed before he could even be told. Sometimes, of course, he wasn’t interested anyway. It was different during the war. People thought they might never see each other again. It made them careless.’

  Gillian could understand that.

  ‘In those days,’ her mother went on, ‘it was all backstreet ways of dealing with it, and those places were terrible. They paid for their mistakes right enough, one way or another.’

  Gillian was so taken aback by this it was a few moments before she managed to say,

  ‘Do you think that’s what Susan should have done? When – you know – ’

  ‘Instead of having Kate? You forget, Susan thought Adam was coming back and that’s what made her think she wanted the baby.’

  ‘Oh it was all over, Mum, that’s why she came to stay with you and Dad. She said she never wanted to see him again, remember, she was always saying that.’

  Grace looked at her, and Gillian had the sensation of being a teenager again with a sister in trouble, a sister who, it seemed, had told her mother more than she realised. It was not Gillian she had confided in, not Frances.

  ‘Oh I know what she said,’ Grace scoffed, ‘but believe me, she thought Adam was coming back. Despite what her father told her.’

  ‘As far as Kate’s concerned,’ Gillian said, I think she’ll have to have this baby. She didn’t tell anyone until it was much too late for an abortion. Even Frances didn’t know.’

  Grace sat back and took her glasses off.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘The silly lassie.’

  ‘So,’ Frances explained, ‘that’s why I’ve been neglecting you, that’s why things are so difficult just now.’

  ‘I see.’

  They were in Kenny’s kitchen, smelling of the old Rayburn that kept it not quite warm enough in winter and stuffy hot in summer. On a fine April morning it was a comfortable place to sit at the old Formica-topped table, the sun streaming in and showing up the grime on the surfaces, balls o
f fluff gathered in the corners of the floor. There was a blue glass vase on the table with daffodils opening, and a stronger aroma even than dust and burning logs – coffee fresh and hot. ‘The state of this place,’ Frances often complained, scouring the mugs before she would drink from them. For the rest, she left the place alone. Kenny liked it this way and it was his place, her escape. She liked it because it was his.

  She watched him pour the coffee. He was the same as ever, his beard still with a gleam of ginger among the grey, his springy pepper-and-salt hair, his old check shirt open at the throat, the cuffs rolled back showing the ginger-brown hairs on his chest and arms. He was substantial, comforting, someone to be counted on for company and sympathy. That was what she wanted this morning.

  ‘So you’ll be needing stronger coffee than usual,’ he said, putting the mug with flying birds in front of her, a mug he had bought in Ullapool because she liked it.

  ‘What I’d love,’ she told him, ‘is to get back to where I thought I was just before Christmas. Life was quiet and ordinary with work and home and the boys – and seeing you.’

  ‘Nothing stays the same, A Ghraidh’, he smiled, sitting down opposite her. ‘You can’t put the clock or the calendar back a single second.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  ‘So I’m sorry, when you’re having troubles, to be adding to them. Or maybe not. You’re a very independent woman.’

  ‘What’s wrong? You’re not ill?’ This was the fear she had for him, the way he drank, the lack of exercise, his asthma.

  ‘I’m fine. Better than I deserve.’ He stretched an arm across the table and took her cool hand in his larger, warmer one. ‘I’m thinking of moving away.’

  The shock of it hardly registered, since it made no sense. He had lived here for years, he belonged. How could he leave?

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘I might give up the cottage and go and live near Neil and Catriona and the bairns.’ Her hand was inert in his, the fingers did not open or return his grasp. He took his hand away. ‘I’ve been enquiring about severance, see will they let me go with a bit of a handshake and a pension. It seems they will so I’ve to put in for it and sign the forms. After that, I’d be free to go. Neil’s been on at me. He thinks I don’t look after myself, living on my own.’

  ‘He’s right.’ She would not feel guilty about this: how many people was she supposed to look after? ‘Kenny, you don’t want to live with Neil, do you? In Edinburgh?’

  ‘Midlothian. And not with them, no, but get a wee flat.’

  ‘A flat! You always say they’re in suburbia.’

  He tipped his chair gently on its back legs, and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Frances, I’m tired of the solitude. It’s not a thing I ever thought I’d say, but I find myself talking to the dog, the shaving mirror, in a way makes me feel I’m half way to the madhouse already.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re the sanest person I know.’

  He laughed. ‘You’re not always of that opinion. Ah no, it’s the drinking, I admit it, aren’t you glad I’m admitting it at last? With the family close by and the bairns to look after now and again, I’d drink less, I’m sure of it.’

  Frances could not think what this sick, sinking feeling was that turned her into a hollow woman. ‘Oh Kenny.’

  ‘What is it? You can come and visit me, sure you can. You’re a great visitor.’

  ‘Don’t! I said I was sorry, please – ’

  ‘You’ve enough to worry you. It’s as well the man himself has turned up again.’

  ‘You mean Alec?’

  ‘I went up the other day to see were you there, but his car was by the house so I didn’t go in.’

  ‘But he’s married to my sister, Kenny, you know that.’

  ‘This would be the sister nobody’s seen for several months?’

  ‘Yes, but – ’

  ‘It’s good to see you today, at last.’

  ‘But,’ she cried with a gasp, the words hurting her to say them, ‘I need you here. I don’t want you to go away and live somewhere else.’ She covered her face with her hands. His chair thudded down on all four legs, scraped back, and he got up and came to her.

  ‘It’s only my coffee and the dog you’d miss.’

  She took her hands away and breathed deep. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ He hesitated then put his arms round her shoulders. She leaned into him, her cheek against the swell of his stomach, feeling the heat from him, his solid strength.

  She would just stay there for a moment, held in the illusion that he would always be there, and she could always come to him.

  As soon as Andrew got off the bus and saw his mother, he knew something was up.

  ‘How’s Grandpa?’ he asked as he heaved his bag onto the back seat of the car and got in beside her.

  ‘Much better. He’ll be home in a few days. How was the concert?’

  ‘Magic.’ He glanced at her again as she put the car in gear. ‘Mum!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You got your hair cut!’

  ‘You noticed.’ She grinned at him, turning her head. How light it was, how airy and light. The long coil of her hair was on the back seat, probably flattened by his rucksack now, in a polythene bag the hairdresser had given her. She did not know why she had taken it with her, this macabre object, cut off from her now like her past. Not like her past. As soon as she got home, she would throw it out.

  ‘Wow, you look really good. When I saw you, I thought something was wrong, you looked so different.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, as they began to drive out of Inverness, ‘something is wrong. So brace yourself Andrew, there are more changes coming than your mother getting her hair cut for the first time in twenty years.’

  Part IV

  Waiting for a Signal

  1

  In June, the crying began. At first it was just at night, and Frances would stand outside the bedroom door listening and wondering whether to go in. It was muffled, private crying and it soon subsided. Later, it gathered momentum: it was wilder and harder and not just at night. No-one could ignore it then.

  Andrew would stand by his mother’s bed late at night or in the early hours of the morning, pleading with her: ‘Can’t you do something to make her stop? She’s off again, it keeps waking me up.’

  Frances would rise with a sigh. ‘I don’t think there’s anything really wrong. She’s just crying.’

  ‘Is it because she’s having this baby or what?’ He had gone beyond embarrassment. He wanted to be helpful but was baffled in the face of this. Besides, he didn’t really want anything to do with it. If he had to, he would, but on the edge, handing over a box of tissues or holding the car door when Kate, becoming ungainly, struggled to get out. That was his limit. The rest he expected his mother to deal with.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Kate always said. ‘Leave me alone.’

  Red-eyed, she trudged off to get the school bus each morning, and Frances continued to be grateful she was still willing to go, and the school to have her. She always came home more cheerful. Frances would find her watching television with Andrew, and they seemed quite companionable. Then, after a couple of weeks of this, she began crying one morning at breakfast, soundlessly, tears falling as if she were helpless to stop them, salty tears like fat raindrops, dripping from her chin into a plate of bran flakes.

  Andrew set off for the bus alone while Frances called Christine and asked her to take assembly. ‘I’ll be a bit late.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Well, yes, all right, but – ’

  ‘Tell me later. Don’t worry – we can manage.’

  Christine had been appalled when Frances first told her Kate was pregnant: ‘Every mother’s nightmare.’ Later, she recounted the story of some woman she had overheard on a train, talking about her illegitimate grandchild. ‘When all’s said and done,’ this woman had asserted, ‘it’s a family baby. There’s worse things could hap
pen.’

  ‘I agree with her,’ Frances said, surprising both Christine and herself. ‘It’s a family baby. We’ll look after the bairn ourselves. It’ll be fine.’

  Sitting helplessly by the weeping Kate, handing her squares of kitchen towel to mop up the tears, she was not so sure.

  ‘It’s your hormones,’ she told Kate. ‘I promise you’ll feel better soon.’

  It was not just Kate’s hormones that made her cry. Frances, who had unwillingly begun to remember a time when she had cried like this, guessed as much. Frances never cried now. It was as if, having done so much stifled, hidden crying in the terrible months after Alec left, she had no tears left. She recognised the helplessness of Kate’s weeping, the rise and fall of it, the hiccups and shuddering indrawn breath when she tried to stop, the useless tears which kept spilling out. She felt helpless, exasperated and full of pity.

  ‘She’s not coming back, is she?’ Kate said at last.

  It was almost July, almost the school holidays, though Kate had not gone to school for the last couple of weeks. Summer had blazed out as soon as the exam season was under way, and they were sitting in the kitchen at eleven o’clock one Saturday morning, a widening triangle of sunshine creeping in at the open door through the back porch. The grey cat lay in this yellow light, his fur-tips gleaming, washing his side with leisurely sweeps of pink tongue. Kate had almost stopped crying. This was the first bout for several days. She was drenched in tears, her eyes heavy lidded, her face white with fatigue. She leaned her chin on one hand, elbow propped on the table. They were alone: the rugby season over, Andrew was still in bed.

  Frances understood at once.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Frances said. ‘I’m sorry, that’s no help.’

  ‘I wish I knew where she was,’ Kate sighed. ‘I can’t sort of picture her, you know?’ She sniffed, then took a tissue from one of the boxes Frances kept around the house now, and blew her nose. ‘When I was little,’ she went on, ‘she took me to the hospital where she was working and I saw the ward and everything. All old ladies lying still, kind of creepy. But at least I could imagine it after that, imagine her looking after them. Do you see what I mean?’