How It Was

by Janet Ellis

  When I was small, a bomb fell on the corner of our road. It sliced the house in its path in half, revealing rooms and staircases. A lavatory was propped against only open air and a wardrobe dangled over a new precipice. It had seemed impertinent to stare, as if you could suddenly see the house’s underwear. The open space around us widened and gaped in the same way now, exposing us to the elements. ‘Later, not here,’ I said.

  Adrian got up without saying anything and without looking at me. He went back to the easel. I lay down and tried to cope with the ground’s assault. It seemed to get harder and more lumpen by the moment.

  Adrian turned round. He opened his arms wide in exaggerated exasperation and came back to where I lay. ‘What are we like?’ he said, burying his hands in his hair in mock despair. ‘I can’t concentrate, I keep remembering you’re here.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said. He wanted me. I felt sharper now and calmer. It was like stepping off what looked like a cliff to discover it was only the height of a kerb. I picked up the blanket and shook it, sending grass and little twigs into the air. He took the other side and we began to fold it together, like two washerwomen taking sheets off the line. We got closer together at each folding until we stood toe to toe and then we kissed for quite a while. We didn’t speak after that. He packed up his things and I emptied the last drops of tea from the cup.

  ‘Were you surprised to see me in that funny shop?’ he asked, as we neared the end of the path.

  ‘Temple’s?’ I said. ‘Yes, I was. It didn’t seem like the sort of place you’d go.’

  ‘Sheila told me you might be there,’ he said.

  My stomach contracted. ‘Did she? Is that why you went? What did she say?’

  ‘Just that I might bump into you, that you liked the little café there. It looked ghastly, but just as I was going to leave – there you were.’

  ‘She told me you liked it there too. Why would she do that?’ I said.

  Adrian shrugged. ‘Does it matter? We’d have made things happen on our own. At least we needn’t go back to that grim little place again.’

  I didn’t feel reassured. ‘Has she done that before? Told you where to meet someone?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Adrian?’

  We’d reached his car. He put everything down while he reached for his keys. ‘Better not kiss you goodbye,’ he said. ‘Just in case the witch is watching.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. I kissed him hard, holding the Thermos against his back as I squeezed my arms round him.

  ‘Oh kay,’ he said. ‘Don’t get reckless.’ He disentangled himself, pushing me away. I saw him glance upwards at the windows of the house as if we might be observed.

  There’s no one there, I thought. I know exactly where everyone is. Including Sarah. Especially Sarah.

  When I got to the door, I realised he hadn’t answered my question. I picked up the milk bottles. They’d been on the step all day, like beacons, advertising my absence.

  Chapter 52

  5 October

  Of course, I have actually been kissed. Three times. Although two of those times were by the same boy. It was all right at first. We were lying down on his single bed and we had to keep changing grip, like those wrestlers on television. We paused between each hold and grunted into the next position. But the longer it went on, the more bored I felt. I opened my eyes in the middle of the kissing. His face looked like a different landscape. His forehead loomed over the wide prairies of his cheeks. His nose ploughed furrows into my face. His lips were soft then hard, like excavators looking for a spot to plant his tongue. He opened his eyes and sprang away from me, leaning backwards, but his pelvis stayed fused to mine, as if we were Siamese twins joined at the hip.

  I practised kissing last night. I lay on my bed and folded my pillow in half. I closed my eyes. He said you are beautiful, and I said how beautiful and he said very. So I said do you want to kiss me and he said yes and he did. His hand was on my shoulder and he stroked me. He kissed me and I said don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop. The pillow man had Adrian Mr Cavanagh’s face.

  Chapter 53

  Eddie had made good plans for when he was grown up. Most adults wasted their opportunities and that wasn’t going to happen to him. They ate food that didn’t seem to excite them and they went to bed too early. He wouldn’t have to be hurried out of Young’s Toys when he was big. He’d spend as long as he liked choosing things from the glass cabinet, without an adult yawning and hurrying him up. He felt under his desk for the lump of chewing gum somebody had stuck there. On cold days it was solid, but if the weather warmed it up even a little, it softened and smelled.

  The painting man in the fields was good at being grown up. He’d greeted Eddie without any fuss, instead of asking him what he was doing there. He’d let Eddie sit with him while he held his drying picture in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He’d waved both as he spoke. Eddie knew he was late home afterwards and had braced himself for his mother’s ire. He was puzzled by her soft response. He was even more puzzled by her failure to tell the painting man he oughtn’t to park his car outside the gate, because she’d been going on and on about people disobeying and when there was someone she could actually be cross with, she let him off. When he was big, he’d say what he meant, then do it.

  Chapter 54

  I haven’t been home long when the telephone rings. It is probably the hospital. I’ll wait a moment, to gather myself. It seems vital that I don’t go to pieces. I am relieved to have set myself a goal. I have no other plans. The answerphone clicks into action, my recorded voice sounds clipped and shrill. I hear an inhabited pause as the caller waits. I imagine Sarah breathing in, ready to speak. She says nothing. She hangs up.

  The next call rouses me in darkness and I wake to find a magazine over my face. I’m infuriated by the lapse, because it feels undignified and elderly to slide into sleep under whatever I’m reading. This time, the caller is hesitant, stumbling over my name and the information she must deliver. She’s sorry. Her apologies pepper her speech. It was very quick, she says, but Mr Deacon has passed. No, he is dead, I think. I reassure her that I’m calm, that I’m coming, that I’m grateful. It’s an awful call for you to make, I say. Thank you for being so understanding, she says. She tells me about what I must do next without pausing and I wonder if she’s reading the instructions from a card. We say polite goodbyes to each other. I put the phone down and howl into the room. I have no choice but to make the sound. It is loud and overwhelming, as impossible to prevent as being sick or fainting. It occupies every inch of me until I am out of breath. I am not frightened, I have been this powerless before. It will let me go soon.

  I write the emails and leave the messages I must. The description of what has happened sounds cold and spare, as if these are words that shouldn’t apply to someone I knew. When I see Michael’s coat on the hook in the porch, I am puzzled to see it there. Surely, I think, he should have taken everything with him, when he left. I look more closely. It is my coat, of course.

  After I’d watched Adrian leave, I saw myself in the hall mirror. I’d caught the sun, even that late in the year. My cheeks were pink and the freckles across my nose were darker. I took a half-finished tin of baked beans from the fridge. I couldn’t remember how long it had been in there. It was sealed with a rubber lid, another purchase from Franny’s selection. Underneath, the contents gleamed orange and glutinous. I sniffed at them but they didn’t seem to smell of anything at all. I ate from the tin. I’ve become feral, I thought. In a few more weeks, I’ll be going through dustbins. When I was little, my father had come home with a kitten. I must have been about seven . . . I’d wanted to be with the kitten so much that I’d got out of my bath and gone, naked and dripping, to where it slept in a cardboard box. That was exactly how I felt now, I wanted to run to Adrian at once. Whatever had happened to that kitten? My father had got rid of everything when my mother died. I couldn’t remember a cat in th
e house at all.

  I stood on the little pedal then widened the bin’s lid with one hand as the mechanism creaked. There were some bits of paper at the bottom, which I’d swept out of the drawer when I hunted for a pen. Old bus tickets and dry cleaning receipts and a torn letter with a familiar heading. I read Dr Mosley and felt a rush of alarm. I dropped the tin and watched the thick sauce leak and obscure it. This was only a routine letter from the surgery, but the sight of his name wounded me all over again.

  I’d thought I only wanted one child. The baby, her pink newness and the smell of her, was enough. I read The Reader’s Digest Book of Childcare so often I almost imagined the family in the photographs was my own. I’d even planted marigolds because that mother knelt beside a bed of them, her pudgy knees indenting the grass, holding out her arms for her baby’s next step.

  I couldn’t quite tell when it wasn’t enough. Certainly by the time I was putting away matinee jackets or consigning bootees to the ottoman, I knew there was an empty ache in my arms that Sarah’s toddler shape was too large to fill. I began to crave being pregnant, feeling the rolling waves of a baby inside me. I wanted to run my fingers over its unknown shape, trying to make out a head or hand as an odd hardness pushed at the skin on my stomach. The space beside Sarah was filled with a smaller child that no one else could see.

  When I tried to tell Michael how I felt, I failed. Or he only heard the possibility of saying no when I said, ‘Don’t you wish you’d had a son?’ or ‘Do you suppose Sarah will mind being on her own?’ He asked me why I was keeping all the outgrown clothes and walking reins, each little blanket or bonnet folded with tissue in the chest of drawers. I muddled an answer about somebody else wanting them some day. He seemed to accept my response, although I made sure I put my treasure trove somewhere he wouldn’t see it. Months later, stirring porridge for Sarah, I felt suddenly repulsed by the sight of it and a rush of sweet saliva filled my mouth. I counted up weeks on my fingers several times as the porridge stuck to the bottom of the saucepan. I had to wait all day to tell Michael what I suspected, almost walking around on tiptoe to keep my secret and my baby safe.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant,’ I said and wished at once I hadn’t, because he snapped back in his chair with a whiplash of disappointment and horror.

  ‘Are you sure? How? I’m so careful,’ he said.

  ‘It happens,’ I said, thinking that the dialogue in the scene I’d rehearsed in my head contained a great deal more joy and delight.

  ‘Have you been to the doctor?’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘Right,’ Michael said. He was obviously hoping Dr Mosley would diagnose indigestion or wind and I wouldn’t have to mention the subject again.

  I didn’t want to go to the surgery. I disliked the way no one spoke in the chilly waiting room. They looked disapproving if you made any sound at all, even a cough, and I had to keep shushing Sarah as she played with the tired toys they kept in the basket by the door. Dr Mosley laid his hands on my stomach as he looked out of the window on to the tiny, unused garden outside. His flesh was white and swollen, as if he’d spent too long under water. It made me think of the sunken contents of specimen jars in a museum. When he stuck his fingers inside me, he caught my eye.

  ‘I think so, yes. I’m pretty sure,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll take a drop of blood to confirm.’ He looked across to Sarah, piling scuffed wooden blocks into a tower. ‘A nice gap between your children,’ he said. He took the last block away from Sarah’s hands and finished the tower himself. ‘Off you go, missy,’ he said.

  When I told Michael, he only said, ‘Right, then.’

  The Reader’s Digest woman probably got flowers.

  The first pain flicked, present then absent, so quickly that I could almost have pretended I’d imagined it. I was through queasiness by then, beginning to feel the waistbands of my skirt tighten and a heaviness in my breasts. I was hanging washing on the line. I wasn’t doing anything strenuous, I thought. It was a comma of discomfort, that’s all, no more than that. But it left a mark on me, like a thumbprint in wet clay. It was shaped like fear. Several hours later, I felt it again. It grew. At first it was a small, curled fist, then the fingers spread until its sharp nails even reached to my shoulders and shins. I knew that I would see blood mingled with the water in the lavatory bowl, but even so, when I did, I gasped, because it was an unarguable fact. I took Sarah to a neighbour. We were still living in the cottage then, and the woman living next door was old enough to be my mother. She absorbed my distress as if she were a plump, worn cushion.

  I lay on the bed as hope turned liquid and leaked from me. At one point, I rose in pain and cried out in the bathroom as I expelled the last of what I had tried so hard to hold on to. Michael found me in darkness and didn’t even ask what was happening. He brought me a boiled egg and cold toast on a little tray I didn’t recognise. I cleared it away myself later, uneaten. By the time I had made my appointment with Dr Mosley, three days later, Michael had assumed a confident bluster. He hugged me and kissed the top of my head with some force. I felt bruised by his wooden limbs. The doctor had the same breeziness as he informed me of my commonplace loss and my youth. Michael at least knew better than to throw me platitudes or jolly comfort. He just waited. I was bleached by grief. When I looked at Michael, I couldn’t see him. The edges of him were soft and out of focus. He was camouflaged so effectively in the rooms he stood in, or against the streets through the window as he drove the car, that I could barely make him out.

  When I’d discovered I was pregnant again, I waited to be afraid. I steeled myself, expecting a tide of panic. It never came. Instead, I sank into that pregnancy like fruit into jelly. Though Dr Mosley had long since confirmed Eddie’s beginning and peered more frequently into the children’s ears or throats than he ever had at my burgeoning stomach, I could not forgive him for witnessing my failure, all those years before.

  The doorbell rang, two harsh notes. It’ll be a salesman, I thought. The bell sounded again and was followed up by loud knocking as whoever was there tried another approach. I stiffened. I’d like to have crept upstairs, but you could see movement in the hallway through the circle of distorting glass in the top panel and I couldn’t trust whoever stood outside not to press their face to the window and catch me sneaking away.

  I stood stock-still, as if any move I made would reveal me, even though I was two rooms away from where the visitor stood. When Sheila rapped on the back door, I actually shouted aloud in panic.

  ‘Good grief, Marion.’ Sheila looked alarmed, too. ‘Didn’t you hear the bell?’ she said. ‘I knocked, too. What were you doing?’

  ‘Planning a menu,’ I said.

  ‘Were you?’ Sheila looked around suspiciously for evidence. She was tightly trussed into one of her not-quite-suits. Her legs were capped with little black patent shoes as if otherwise her feet would fray. The top of her head was edged with a tight perm. A row of large beads glimpsed beneath her scarf threatened to perforate her neck.

  ‘I won’t stay long,’ she said, ‘but I have got time for a cup of tea. If you’re having one.’ She put her handbag on the table, then started to take off her coat.

  I felt just as I did when I was recovering from flu. I’d had to concentrate hard on even the simplest tasks, as if I’d forgotten how everything worked. ‘Of course I am,’ I said.

  ‘I came round earlier. Where have you been?’ Sheila settled herself, sitting sideways from the table so that she could watch me more carefully. Her scarf was a hectic pattern of yellows and browns, secured at her neck with an enamelled clasp. She undid it and folded the scarf up into a neat square.

  I thought of Adrian folding the blanket in the field and shivered.

  Sheila continued her inspection. ‘Been out all day?’ she said. Her expression changed. ‘I saw Adrian’s car,’ she said. ‘Further up the lane. Did you see him?’ She left a little space round her question, sending it airborne to hover above us,
waiting for a reply.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What a shame,’ Sheila said, putting her head on one side with an exaggerated expression of sympathy, as if she’d just been told that I was very ill. The room filled with a high piercing whistle. ‘Kettle!’ She gesticulated towards the cooker as if I might not recognise the source of the noise.

  ‘He was looking for you,’ Sheila said, still watching me. ‘He said he was going to take you with him, if you wanted to go. Honestly, I think he imagines it’s some sort of treat. Sitting about while he paints. What on earth would you do? You could hardly get on with anything useful, could you?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘You oughtn’t to be missing each other all the time,’ Sheila said. ‘One in, one out, like that little couple in the weather house. A mug’s fine,’ she said, as if conferring a kindness. She pulled the pile of magazines and papers towards her and sifted through them as she spoke. ‘St Thomas’s School,’ she read aloud, examining the envelope on the top. ‘School report?’ She held it up.

  ‘School photo. Sarah’s,’ I said.

  Sheila took this as assent. ‘Of course, it’s all individual photographs now, isn’t it?’ she said, shaking the pictures out on to the table and squinting at them. ‘In our day, all you got was a picture of the entire school, didn’t you? It was hard enough to find your own face among everyone else’s, let alone recognise your chums. She’s lovely.’ She picked up one of the photographs and showed it to me, as if she were reminding me of what my daughter looked like. ‘Adrian said he thought you two were very similar, but I can’t see it.’