Consequences

by Penelope Lively

  Ruth tells the ceiling of the hospital delivery room that she is not doing this again, no way. She tells the ceiling and the midwife and Peter but she tells in yelps and grunts so no one takes any notice and when eventually someone puts Jess into her arms, this warm damp creature, this person, she forgets all that, she sheds the last few hours; with a single bound she is into a new world, a different world, one in which you understand something you never knew existed.

  “What’s for supper?”

  Peter is City Editor now. His pay packet has prospered, his working hours have stretched. The Editor comes home hungry.

  Ruth tells him that she hasn’t a clue what there is for supper. The kitchen drain is blocked, she was half the morning on the phone about that, she had a piece to write, the child-minder only has Jess for three hours, may she remind him. Plus, she has news, but she decides to set that aside for now.

  Peter is focused, as always. He ransacks the fridge and the cupboards and finds the wherewithal to knock up a pasta. Upstairs, Jess is refusing to settle. Her howls raise the temperature. Ruth goes up, comes down, goes up again. She reminds herself that all over the country there are households in this state of ferment. All over the world, indeed: Greenland, Sudan, Peru.

  They eat. Jess subsides, eventually. Ruth feels like a simmering kettle; she judders a little, all over. Peter is reading the City pages of the Standard, plucked from his briefcase. He is back with boardroom machinations and share price predictions. Life as husband and as father suits him well enough, that Ruth knows, but he is able to float free, at will, when he wishes. She watches him reading, and it seems a sudden surprise that he is in her life, at the center of her life, that he arrived and made everything different.

  He made Jess, of course, for which he is to be forever blessed.

  Peter looks at her over the boardrooms and the takeovers—a kindly look. “Everything okay now?”

  She tells him that everything is fine. As indeed it is. Blocked drains and a work crisis are superficial complications, above which a strong woman rises. She thinks of her mother, who waved such things aside.

  “Jess seems to have packed it in at last,” he says.

  “How many children under two are there in the world?”

  “How on earth would I know?”

  “You’re so handy with statistics. I thought you might. Anyway—scads of them. And presumably at any one moment about half are yelling. A kind of global uproar. It puts things in perspective—one’s small local contribution.”

  Peter refolds his paper. “That’s one way of looking at it. I can’t say it helps much.”

  Definitely not the moment to give him her news. “Maybe there’s an article here,” she wonders. “Bedtime performance—the cultural divide. French toddlers dining out in restaurants. Is there bedtime in Zambia, say?” Write out of your own concerns, she has been telling herself. Motherhood is opportunity; half the nation was raising young, and professionally interested.

  “Have fun,” says Peter. “Coffee?”

  She gives him a slightly sour look. Detachment is one thing, within a partnership, but sometimes Peter steps aside rather too swiftly.

  “No, thank you. I am going to see what Google has to offer on the subject.”

  Simon arrived with two Sainsbury carrier bags which he dumped on Ruth’s kitchen table. “Here it is—the family silver. A portfolio of your grandfather’s engravings, and some of his tools, and some of his blocks. I’ve been meaning to bring them ever since I finished clearing out the Fulham house. I found them in a cupboard in the basement.”

  They spread the engravings out on the table. Jess reached up, trying to grab. Ruth provided a biscuit as distraction. In another room, the baby was grizzling. Simon thought: heavens, she’s not a girl any more, suddenly. He saw ten-year-old Ruth, seventeen-year-old Ruth—overlaid by this harassed woman with bags under her eyes and a stained T-shirt.

  “Wow!” said Ruth. “Some of these I’ve never seen. Mum’s got the farmyard with geese. And that one—the church. Look at this—blackberries and spiderwebs—amazing. He was very good, wasn’t he?”

  “Very. One of the best.”

  Simon waved toward the carrier bags. “The tools are wrapped up. Maybe they should go to some young practitioner? And the blocks are in bubble wrap. I have a feeling they need some fancy conservation box. Lucas was never into that sort of thing, needless to say.”

  “I’ll take them all to Mum. We’re going down there next week. Do you know—there are only a couple of photographs of him. And he looks so young.”

  “He was.”

  “Younger than I am now. Not how you think of a grandfather.”

  Simon said, “What is known about how he died?”

  “Not a lot. Mum’s got a letter her mother had from someone in his unit. Just that he was shot in an action near—Heraklion, I think it was.”

  “I’ve never been to Crete. We thought of a holiday there once—then didn’t go.”

  “Nor me.” Ruth stared down at the engravings. Jess was tugging at her hand, vocal and imperious. The baby was now in full spate. Ruth sighed. “Hang on a minute—I’ll have to get him.” She came back with Tom propped over her shoulder, Jess clutching her leg. “He’s their great-grandfather,” she said. “That seems even more unlikely.”

  “Please remember that you have made me a great-uncle.”

  “Sorry—it wasn’t deliberate.”

  “I am keeping quiet—it does my street credit no good at all.”

  Ruth sat down. She gave Jess a drink of juice, flipped up her T-shirt and began to feed the baby. “Could you put the kettle on—we need a cup of coffee.” She was gazing again at the engravings. “It’s so strange—that these are all that’s left of him. A person gone entirely—but what he saw still there, and how he saw it.” She looked at Simon. “I want to go to Crete, one day—where he was. Is, I suppose—there’s a war cemetery, isn’t there?”

  Whenever Ruth saw Simon, Lucas hovered. There was his beaky nose—a little less pronounced—and the thick glasses, and that gawky stance. Later, she would look in the mirror, seeking her parents, and find at first nothing but her own familiar features, and then all of a sudden Molly would signal—something about the line of a nostril, the set of the mouth—and then she would see an echo of James Portland’s intent look, those large brown eyes, and his sleek dark hair. The codes are eloquent, if you can read them. She would inspect Jess and Tom—their volatile infant faces, which in time would refer to herself, and to Peter, and to uncles and aunts and grandparents. The ineradicable genetic inheritance. We are ourselves, but we remember everyone else.

  In the world that was without Lucas, Simon had found himself untethered. There was Tim, and there were the satisfactions of domesticity—the little Victorian terrace house, their pleasure in kitting it out; there was the bookshop in the prosperous London suburb, and its demanding routine. But he felt as though he had walked into strange territory, with crucial landscapes out of sight. He remembered doing just that as a child—getting lost in streets not far from home and searching in panic for some familiar reference point. He talked a lot to Molly, on the phone, in those first weeks and months. “I’m sorry—I’m making an awful fuss about being orphaned at forty-six.”

  “I’d like you less if you didn’t.”

  He knew that Molly, too, was bereft, and had the additional burden of the struggle toward recovery from the accident. Her pain and frustration rang out, as she reported small advances. She had walked to the garden gate—“A ten-mile hike, in my terms”; she could do a few kitchen tasks—“Peeling a potato has never been so enthralling.” Hearing her, he felt further disoriented; all his life, she had been the busy, feisty, vigorous presence. He could not bear this diminishment, this endurance.

  He said to Tim, “It’s not fair, is it? Nothing’s fair.”

  “Of course not. One knew that at the age of five. And said so.”

  Tim was ten years older than Simon, an editor in
a fine art publishing firm. He had been greatly admiring of Lucas, with a professional appreciation of his past achievements, and indeed had set about making a collection of Heron Press editions, trawling the catalogs of specialist dealers. For Simon, Tim had arrived in his life at a point when he was in discontented solitude after several short-term relationships, and he relished this stability, the unexpected haven that Tim provided, his solid presence, their shared concerns. The bumpy passage of his earlier years was a slightly distasteful memory; now, there were the holidays in Italian hill-towns, the visits to friends in the country, the considered acquisition of a CD, a new picture, something choice to cook at the weekend. “I feel middle-aged,” he told Molly. “And I love it.”

  To the garden gate. Soon after, fifty yards along the lane. Then, a visit to the supermarket. Molly edged back into mobility, into a semblance of life before the accident. She could work again, but had to cut back and take a less demanding job; driving any distance was a strain, she could not walk far or stand for long. This is how it would be, now.

  Sam had told her that in the weeks after the accident he came close to seeking out the man with defective brakes: “To clobber him from here to kingdom come, you understand. For the first time I knew blood lust.”

  “It would have been satisfying,” said Molly. “Unfortunately you’d have gone to prison.”

  “Exactly. I have never before regretted the rule of law.”

  Molly, too, had known bouts of vindictive rage, in the early weeks. Now, she saw the man more dispassionately, as just one of those malign interventions, on a par with the cancer cell.

  James Portland had come to visit her in hospital, bearing an armful of roses, and glancing around the ward with ill-concealed alarm. Molly said, “You won’t often have come eyeball to eyeball with the NHS.”

  “I’m afraid not. Molly, if there’s anything at all I can do. Somewhere more private…I’d be happy to…”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine here. Or as fine as it is possible to be under the circumstances.”

  He sat down. Beyond a drifting curtain, a family party was loudly installed beside the neighboring bed. Molly shrugged. “It’s all right, James—distractions can be therapeutic.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t come to terms with this. You—of all people.”

  “Why not me?”

  “Just that you have always seemed to lead some sort of charmed life. Ever since you so resolutely turned me down. You decide where you are going, and get there.”

  “Well, not this time.” After a moment, Molly went on, “Actually, I thought something similar of you. You seemed to move with such certainty.”

  “It hasn’t always felt like that,” he said. “Or, indeed, worked out thus.”

  His hair was gray now; he had lowered himself a little stiffly into the chair. Molly had not seen him for some years, and was startled; he must be in his mid-seventies. She wondered about his marriage: over the years, oblique remarks from Ruth had hinted that perhaps all was not entirely well. The suggestion was that of an arrangement that was convenient rather than one that flourished.

  James said, “Ruth will keep me informed about how things go with you.” He paused. “Do you think this chap of hers is a fixture?”

  “It is looking rather like it.”

  “She brought him to the house. Positive in his views, was the impression I got.”

  “In other words, you had an argument.”

  James smiled. “If you like. There was some talk about the publishing world. No doubt he saw me as a relict, where the trade is concerned. Which I suppose I am.”

  “What did Ruth do?”

  “Sat there. Detached.”

  Molly laughed, then winced and closed her eyes for a moment.

  “Look—I’m tiring you,” he said.

  “It’s all right. Diversion is good for me.”

  He sighed. “Molly, once again…if at any point there is anything…”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. And thank you.”

  When Ruth became a mother she had the universal, unexceptional, hackneyed revelation—she perceived her own mother differently. She also stared backward and saw that almost mythical figure, her grandmother. This experience of her own had been theirs, but it had been otherwise, because springing from different circumstances. She thought of her grandmother, a girl alone in wartime, and of Molly, another girl—alone for another reason. She looked at herself—older than they had been, and with a husband who returned each evening to the Edwardian semi in which machines hummed and bleeped, where wars were pictures on a screen of somewhere far away, where children were a shared concern, and one that drove out most others—a source of delight, anxiety, and exponential expense. It occurred to her that children had assumed power, over the century. Once, they were to some extent expendable; you had lots, in order to end up with a few. Today, they arrived to a safety net of state provision and a status of near sanctity. They had rights and agencies and an elaborate infrastructure of support and protection. As a parent, you enjoyed some of the fallout; you had vicarious status, conferred on you by the children. So long as you performed as was required, you too were privileged citizens, with dispensations and handouts. Until you abused your position, when the guardians would come knocking at your door.

  Jess and Tom had appeared to be well aware of their strength, and dictated from day one. Had the children of the past been less assertive, more propitiating, with survival itself in question? This seemed unlikely, given the nature of the beast; presumably their wails were merely background noise, casually ignored, instead of the deciding factor of daily life. Ruth danced attendance when on duty, and worried about the children’s welfare when the child-minder took over so that she could work. The children howled at will, then smiled, and had Ruth at their mercy. Even Peter, whose involvement was less entire, found himself in servitude, early married life now an unimaginable nirvana. He made no complaints, and was briskly competent with the impedimenta of a family excursion, adept with buggies and car seats and travel cots. Once, he said, “It’s amazing, the power they have.”

  “I know.”

  “An economic phenomenon. Incredible levels of consumption.”

  Ruth said, “I was thinking more of the emotional clout.”

  “Oh, that too.” Peter was examining the new double buggy. “How much are these?”

  “I can’t remember exactly. Expensive.”

  “I’m going to do a big piece on nursery products marketing. Mothercare will be hearing from me.”

  He was a man who sniffed the breeze, as a matter of routine—an automatic opportunism that made him a successful journalist. Children had happened to him, but could also be put to good use.

  Jess is threading beads. She works with intense concentration, small fingers steering the stiff thread into the hole, biting her lower lip. Red bead, then blue, then green.

  Ruth observes. “That’s a nice pattern.”

  “It’s a necklace for you. To go to parties in.”

  Ruth glows. “Can I have some yellow beads too?”

  “No,” says Jess. “This necklace doesn’t have yellow beads.”

  “Right,” says Ruth. “Fine. It’s lovely as it is.”

  Tom is in rapt communion with his police car, lying on his stomach, pushing it round and round, making nee-naw noises. This is one of those halcyon moments when everyone is content, fulfilled. The three of them. Let me stay here forever, thinks Ruth—in this hour, in this afternoon. This is as good as it gets, surely? And then, immediately…no, what a crass idea. No future? No anticipation, no expectations?

  What does she anticipate? Expect? She looks at Jess and tries to multiply her by three, shoot her up to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. She projects an adult Tom, driving a police car, maybe—nee-naw, nee-naw. Jess is five. She lives by the day; past and future are murky areas, which she does not much visit. That is the difference, thinks Ruth: to be grown-up is always to be then as well as now. Most disconcer
ting.

  Somewhere on the rim of memory there flickers an image of a pond toward which she leans, and topples. And then she is on the grass, and Molly is pulling off her legs great strands of slimy green stuff, and she is shrieking. Five? Six? Whatever, it is ineradicable.

  She tells Jess, “When I was five I fell in a pond.”

  Jess is mildly interested. “Were you drowned?”

  “Not quite. In fact, not nearly. I was silly to lean over the pond like that,” Ruth adds, mindful of example.

  Jess drops a bead. She drops a bead, tries to recover it, and then lets fall the string of threaded beads, which slide off, the necklace is disintegrating, Jess is distraught, this halcyon moment is shattered, like the still surface of water…like the surface of that pond, which Ruth now sees again, rising toward her as she falls. She gathers up the beads, she soothes. “Look,” she says. “We can put it together again. Now—how did it go? Red, blue, green?”

  The Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving exhibition is crowded. This is the opening view, to which Molly has received an invitation, as surviving family of one of the principle artists featured. But Molly is down with one of these bouts of bronchitis that she gets so often these days, and has passed on the invitation to Ruth. And Peter, who announced at the last moment that he’d come along, too.

  Ruth moves around the room. She spends a long time with Matt’s work, so familiar, but looking somehow different here, alongside so much else that is beautiful, arresting, provocative—and holding up well, she notes with pride, with pleasure. He is not just good, he is one of the very best.

  Peter is elsewhere. Occasionally she catches sight of him, peering at a label, making a note on that pad he carries always with him. Once, she is alongside him when he is quizzing the curator of the exhibition, who is politely concealing a certain impatience: no, he does not know the current value of a Gertrude Hermes. For that, he suggests, it might be better for Peter to address himself to one of the specialist galleries, or an auction house.