It was always between the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh ops, every time I saw him. He’d got through so much, why shouldn’t he start believing he was going to get through it all?
He’s dead and gone, she told herself. The war has been over for years. I’m going to have Philip’s child.
‘We can’t stay here,’ Philip was saying. ‘I’ll go and see the bank manager tomorrow.’
‘It may be nothing,’ Isabel warned, but it made no impression.
‘Whatever happens, it’s time we had a home of our own,’ he said.
She loved the look on his face, but she feared it too. All that purpose and protection was folding around her, but it could turn against her too. She had only to open her mouth and he would hate her. She was afraid that some force stronger than herself, some demon of self-destruction, would put words into her mouth and make her speak out. Philip wasn’t the kind of man who would be able to forgive her. Where he trusted, he did so implicitly; he could not forgive betrayal. But I’ve done nothing, she told herself. It’s not real, none of it is real. It’s the landlady. The war has been over for years, but she’s still obsessed with it. She won’t let go.
Isabel took Philip’s hand, turned it over and folded her own into it. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid we’ll be here for ever,’ she said, ‘with Mrs Atkinson walking to and fro all night, until we’re old and grey.’
‘That won’t happen. I’ll make enquiries. The bank manager’s wife is a patient of Dr Ingoldby’s. If people like us can’t get a mortgage …’
Isabel sat at the dressing table, creaming her face before bed. She could hear Philip whistling as he riddled the kitchen stove. In the mirror she saw the greatcoat, lying on her side of the bed. Had she put it there? She didn’t think so. She got up, folded the greatcoat and took it into the living room. She would put it back in the cupboard, where it belonged. No. That wasn’t enough. It must be got out of the flat entirely, but for tonight the cupboard would have to do. Isabel fetched a chair, clambered up, opened the cupboard wide and shoved the coat as far back as it would go.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Philip. She turned and there he was in the doorway, watching her.
‘Putting the coat away. I don’t need it now that we’ve got the eiderdown.’
‘You shouldn’t climb like that.’ He held out his hands to her. She took them, and he jumped her down lightly, taking her weight.
In the night, she woke. The weight was on her again, pushing her down. She put out her hand and felt the thick woollen cloth. Terror crawled over her skin, and she lay dead still, not daring to reach out or speak to Philip. Stiff, staring into the dark, she lay until sleep swallowed her again. In the morning Philip said, ‘I thought we were getting rid of that thing. Don’t tell me you got up in the middle of the night and dug it out of that cupboard again.’
‘I’m going to wrap it up and put it in the dustbin.’
‘You can’t do that, Isabel. It’s not ours.’
‘I don’t care. If she wants it that much, she ought to come and take it.’
‘Who?’
‘The landlady, of course. It’s hers.’
‘I daresay the old girl’s forgotten all about it.’
‘Take it to the surgery, Phil. I don’t want it in the flat.’
‘Wouldn’t it be simpler just to take it upstairs to her?’
Tears sprang to her eyes.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it. Don’t get in such a state.’
‘Put it in the boot now.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Is, I’m still in my dressing gown, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘I’ll do it, then.’
Philip never locked the boot. She flew down the steps, holding the greatcoat out as if it were burning, turned the handle and thrust the thing inside.
She walked slowly up the steps. The cold went through her, sharp, piercing, alive. It was over. The coat was gone and soon they would leave the flat behind, and the landlady, and never see her again. She knew that she could sleep now. There would be no tap on the window, or drone of heavy bombers circling for altitude. It was over.
She heard the landlady’s words again: Don’t bother waiting up, he won’t come back.
No, he won’t come back, Isabel thought. For a moment she felt him again, against her, entering her as the sound of the planes entered her ears. She smelled oil and sweat and the faint tang of his oxygen mask on his breath. His fingers tasted of nicotine and they trembled and then steadied as they touched her, tentatively at first and then stroking her skin with infinite gentleness, as if he hadn’t believed he would ever touch a woman’s face again.
Chapter Twelve
FOR WEEKS THE sun had shone. Everyone expected the weather to break, but each morning the sun burned off the early mist and by eight o’clock it was warm enough for Isabel to take her first cup of tea outside. The berries on the rowan were turning red. Everything was ripening early this year.
Michael woke at five, with the birds. The days were long, and Isabel lived them mostly outdoors. They hadn’t tamed the garden yet. The borders had been ghosts of themselves, sunk in weeds, the lawn a field, and the orchard, where one day they planned to keep hens, was still a mass of briar and bramble. The old woman who had owned the house lived there alone for years, retreating until she occupied only a single downstairs room. She had no bathroom, and only a single cold-water tap in the kitchen. The range hadn’t been used for a decade; old Mrs Gawthorpe had lived to ninety-four on bread, cheese and raw onions. There were no relations apart from a nephew in Canada, who was almost seventy himself and only wanted the place sold. It was Dr Ingoldby who told Philip about the house before it was auctioned.
They borrowed from Isabel’s aunt, and from the bank. The house was everything that Philip had ever wanted. The work it needed could all be done in time.
‘I want the children to grow up here,’ he said.
He said ‘the children’, as if there were already a houseful of them. Isabel was pregnant with Michael then. She was booked into the maternity hospital for the birth, but she never got there. The baby took them by surprise, for he was two or three weeks early, according to Philip’s calculations. He was a big, fair infant, weighing eight and a half pounds, and his eyes were blue. All newborns had eyes of that colour, Philip said. Later, they would darken.
‘He’s very fair,’ said Isabel’s aunt when she came to visit.
‘Yes,’ said Isabel.
‘Of course, Richard was blond when he was a little boy.’ She said ‘Richard’, not ‘your father’, as if she and Isabel were equals now. ‘I used to be so jealous. People thought blond curls were absolutely marvellous, in those days. But Richard’s didn’t last.’
‘I expect Michael will go darker too.’
She felt so sure of herself when she was holding the baby that she didn’t care what anyone said. He was an easy baby, everybody said so. Janet Ingoldby declared that Michael was a fluke, and Isabel would get a shock when the next one came along. Michael fed hungrily and seldom cried. He had a way of looking at Isabel when she was buttoning her blouse after a feed, as if they were in perfect agreement: We’re in this together. You look after me, and everything will be all right.
‘He likes it here,’ Isabel said, stroking Michael’s cheek, still not quite believing that this peaceful child could be her own.
‘Of course he does,’ said Philip.
‘He likes the garden. When I put his pram under the rowan tree, even if he’s not asleep, he’ll watch the leaves for hours.’
Each weekend, Philip mowed the rough, bumpy lawn and dug the vegetable garden. While Michael slept, Isabel cleared borders and planted lavender and rosemary; strong things that would thrive. She scattered marigold seed and love-in-a-mist. Every so often she would pause to listen out for the baby, but he rarely cried.
A woman came up from the village to scrub the place once a week. Janet Ingoldby was horrified that Isabel didn’t have m
ore help.
‘It’s fine. I can manage,’ said Isabel.
‘My dear, you’re so brave. But it’s been hopeless since the war. They all go off and get jobs in town.’
Michael filled Isabel’s mind, and soothed it. She lived outdoors in cotton dresses, her arms and legs brown. She brought his playpen out onto the grass and gave him his toys one by one while he lay kicking in the shade. Later, he would sit up with a perfectly straight back, examining a rag book or a giraffe that squeaked. He was nine months old now, and could pull himself up to stand at the railings of his playpen. Day after day the sun shone, the grass tanned, the leaves turned a darker, duskier green.
The village was two miles away, but Isabel never wished it closer. Out here, there was no one to watch her. She was doing what was expected of her, and so she was left alone: she was the doctor’s wife, with her baby and her garden. The delivery van from the village shop found Isabel up a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand, as often as not. Or she would be digging, with her hair tied up in a kerchief, and the baby on his blanket nearby. The vicar called, and Isabel didn’t say that Philip was an atheist; instead, she made tea and talked about the long hours Philip worked. The vicar sat back in his chair in the cool, dark kitchen and rested his eyes on Isabel as she moved about, filling the kettle, bringing cream from the larder for his scones.
‘Your husband is a lucky man,’ he said. She looked at him, startled, and he added quickly, ‘These scones are light as a feather. Take it from me, I’m a connoisseur.’
‘You must be,’ she replied, and her hair swung forward over her face, hiding it.
He kept seeing that swing of hair, loose and shining and also cool somehow, as he drove back to the village in the glare of the afternoon. A nice young family, he would say to his wife.
The more Isabel listened, the more she heard. A tractor far away, and the scream of gulls that came inland to feed from the furrows. The high, invisible skirling of larks in the summer sky when she lay on her back in the meadow that belonged to the house, although it was leased to a farmer who mowed it for hay. The drip of the kitchen tap, the buzz of a bumblebee in the depths of a foxglove flower, and Michael’s crooning as he settled himself to sleep. There were a thousand sounds.
‘You’re sure it’s not too quiet for you out here? You aren’t lonely?’ Philip asked in the first months, but she always said no, and smiled to reassure him, so that he stopped asking. The thought of her tutoring French at the grammar school had fallen away, like everything else from the early months of their marriage. She had Michael, and there would be more children, she was sure of it. The house and garden would fill with them. The back door would always be open, so that she could keep an eye on them, and listen for their quarrels and laughter.
She had told her aunt that she wanted a large family.
‘It’s what people seem to be doing these days,’ said Aunt Jean.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well – the war,’ her aunt had explained briskly, as if it shouldn’t need to be spelled out. ‘I only had Charlie. Your parents only had you. It wasn’t uncommon at the time, but now … It’s to do with replacement, I suppose.’
‘Replacement …’
‘It’s a natural instinct,’ said her aunt.
‘I never thought of it like that.’
‘I don’t suppose you did.’
The word stayed in Isabel’s head for weeks. Replacement. But the frightening thing was how easily the world got on without the dead. All those thousands – millions – yet somehow the houses were full of people, just the same. The dead were gone. They were thought of, but the year rolled round, and then there was another year, and you couldn’t live in the past.
But the dead, of course, couldn’t feel that; if they felt anything. They had missed so much, years and years of life … How could they not feel resentment? The years that were rolling on were the very years that they were missing. They must want them back …
No, she wouldn’t think of that. Instead, Isabel snuffed the warm smell of Michael’s skin. It was so soft; you couldn’t think of anything that was like it. People said silk, or rose petals, but that was nonsense. Michael was here, in her arms, while all those others were not. Even her own mother, if she saw Isabel, might become hungry: She has everything, and I have nothing.
No mother would think that about her own child, Isabel told herself quickly. Her mother would be happy to see Isabel with Michael. She would never begrudge them their life, because she was alive in them.
How black the shadow was, under the pear tree that hadn’t been pruned for years – decades – and yet it still kept valiantly throwing out blossom, and bending down its branches with long drops of immature fruit.
It was early August, and Philip was out in the garden with Michael. Isabel wasn’t well. It was nothing definite, but she was pale and tired, she was sleeping badly and had lost her appetite. Perhaps she was pregnant again? But it was too early to be sure.
‘You go to bed,’ he said, when she couldn’t eat anything at lunch. ‘A couple of hours’ peace is what you need. I’ll keep an eye on Michael. I’ll have to leave at three for afternoon surgery, but I should be home by seven. We can have a scratch supper.’
A scratch supper! Another of Dr Ingoldby’s expressions, no doubt, thought Isabel wearily, as she climbed the stairs. She lay down on top of the covers. It was too hot even for a sheet. People were starting to say that the weather was unnatural. There was talk of prayers for rain. She smiled to herself at the thought of the vicar as a rain-maker.
The bed felt as if it were floating away beneath her. She watched the sun patches quiver on the white walls. How her head ached. Perhaps she was pregnant. Next year there might be another baby. She could only imagine another Michael, as fair and peaceful as the first, waiting patiently for her to open the gate of life and let him in. Well, she could manage that. She had found pregnancy easy, and birth too, against all her expectations. It was only this feeling that kept gaining on her, as if she were living underwater, and the world were swaying around her …
Isabel dozed, and dreamed shallowly, skipping the surface of sleep. Sometimes she heard Michael, sometimes Philip’s deeper tones. He was always careful with Michael. She could trust him. He wasn’t one of these fathers who thought a baby needed to be toughened up by hurling it into the air or clapping his hands in its face.
I’ll go down, thought Isabel, seized with sudden tenderness for Philip. He gets so worried when I’m ill.
The dazzle of the afternoon sun hit her as she stepped out of the door. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the baking heat of the garden. There was Philip, patiently digging dandelions out of the yellowing grass. But the playpen was empty. Her gaze swivelled. No, it was all right, there Michael was, sitting on the—
Her breath caught. She felt the pounding of her heart.
‘Philip!’
‘What’s the matter?’ He was across to her in seconds, his arm round her. ‘You shouldn’t have come down. It’s too hot for you out here.’
‘Philip – the greatcoat.’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘You’ve put him on the greatcoat.’ She broke free of Philip’s grip and ran across the grass. There was the baby, looking up at her out of those eyes that were such a deep blue that they were almost navy. He smiled, and waved his hands at her. She bent down, snatched him up and held him to her so tightly that even placid Michael wriggled in protest. She kicked the coat away as if it were on fire.
‘Why did you bring that thing here? I told you to get rid of it.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Isabel, calm down. You’re frightening Michael. I did take it to the surgery, but Mrs Ramsden came across it when she was cleaning out the hall cupboard. I thought I could use it for gardening, in the winter.’
‘I don’t want it in the house. I want you to burn it.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’ll keep it out in the shed if you’re so bothered about it.’
He was smiling at her, showing
his teeth. You fool, she thought, you fool, and for a moment she hated him with every fibre of her being. But she mustn’t show it. She would let him put the coat in the shed, and then she would get rid of it as soon as he’d gone. She could take a spade and bury it well away from the house, in a ditch, where the earth was soft. Michael would think that was an adventure.
‘I’ve got quarter of an hour before surgery,’ said Philip. ‘Let’s have some tea.’
There they were, the three of them, mother, father and child. Philip carried out the tea, and a sponge cake, and put their deckchairs in the shade of the medlar tree. Michael sat with his own piece of cake, smearing jam over his face, utterly content. The harshness of noon was past now; the light was becoming golden.
‘You look better,’ said Philip. He drank a second cup of tea, took another slice of cake, glanced at his watch.
‘Don’t go,’ said Isabel.
He got up and kissed the top of her head. ‘You know I’ve got to go. Will you be all right? Shall I ask Mrs Poole to come up for a couple of hours?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. You remember our old landlady?’
How could he possibly imagine she’d forgotten? ‘Yes.’
‘Cerebral haemorrhage.’
‘What?’
‘Bleeding in the brain tissue.’
‘I know what it means. But what’s happened – is she dead?’
‘She’s in hospital in York.’
‘Oh … Will she …?’
He frowned. ‘She’s not my patient, Is. But it’s not usually a very bright outlook.’
Now she longed for him to go. She was so tired. She could not think about the landlady, not now. She would take Michael upstairs with her and lie down for a while. Michael might drop off – he hadn’t had his afternoon nap yet. Philip was wiping Michael’s face and hands with the corner of his bib. The baby looked up at him and laughed.
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