I Couldn't Love You More

by Esther Freud

  ‘WELL LOOK AT YOU!’ her Auntie Mavis greeted her. ‘A job as a real-life journalist. We’ll have to watch what we say around you.’ She’d shown her to her nana’s room, where there was the one lumpy bed, and the old lady herself, her silver hair held in a bun, sitting by the window. Rosaleen kissed her worn cheek, and felt the squeeze of her hand. ‘You always were the clever one,’ there was her soft breath in her ear. ‘I’m glad I lived to see the day.’ By the time Rosaleen arrived on her first morning at the doors of the Daily Express, she had to remind herself it was in fact the post room she was working in, and not on a story for the front page.

  * * *

  Felix was preparing for an exhibition. That first weekend Rosaleen waited all morning for him to stop work, and when he showed no sign of it, she slipped on her shoes and opened the door on to the stairs. The creak of it caught his attention. ‘You should see the look on Auntie Mavis’s face,’ she told him as he set aside his chisel. ‘She leaves the hall light on for me, although I ask her not to, and when I do come in she tells me off for wasting the electric. I’ll not hear the end of it, staying out all night.’

  ‘I do see that could be maddening.’

  ‘For her?’

  ‘For you.’ He pushed the hair back from her face and kissed her with such tenderness, pressing the sudden hardness of himself against her so that she thought how marvellous it was – why did no one ever say? – to be alive.

  Within a week Felix had found her a flat in Maida Vale, furnished, the walls, the furniture, the carpet, in softest grey. ‘Who lives here?’ she asked, walking from one room to the next and out on to the narrow wrought-iron balcony that overlooked the street.

  ‘You do.’ Felix smiled, and said when she persisted, ‘They’re abroad.’

  ‘They are? Who are?’

  Felix would not be drawn.

  From then on mostly they met in Maida Vale, or returned there after dinners out, and when she did visit his flat, to collect him, or something he’d forgotten, racing him up the stairs, trying her hardest to overtake, arriving gasping and laughing, always second to the top, he never liked them to stay long. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he warned, but even with only a minute she was able to check on the progress of his work, wander among the fearful flock of creatures, chart the expression of the stone man.

  As the summer wore on there were days, and then more days, when he rang through to the post room to say he was working and had no plans to stop. Rosaleen made herself toast and got into bed early, taking a pen and a notebook, that day’s copy of the newspaper which she trawled through for ideas. Betting shops legalised. Is Alan Bates the future for our leading men? She hoped to present a sample article to the Express, send it via pigeonhole to the appropriate department, and she pictured her name in small serious type. Rosaleen Kelly, she wrote, and then, blushing, Rose Lichtman. She was back at school picking petals off a daisy. ‘Loves me,’ Teresa Donnelly was saying. ‘Loves me not,’ she chorused back, until they were delirious with laughter, and the face of their beloved, the son of a dinner lady who had once been drafted in to mow the lawn, was obscured by their tears.

  Rosaleen folded the paper and allowed herself a dream of Felix. She had to ration herself or she could lose whole days. The cool blue of his eyes, his eagle nose, his shoulders shaking with some silent joke. Enough. She turned back to her notebook. Barclays: the first bank to adopt an in-house computer system. She imagined the bank manager in a space suit, giving orders in a jerky automated voice. She mapped out an article about the planned redevelopment of London. A motorway flowing through the centre. Old buildings cleared. When this was done she rewarded herself with a letter. It had only been two days but she gave Felix all her news: the gossip from the post room, what new and mysterious item had arrived in the mail. She described her lunch with the aunties, her cousins’ blushes when she wore her new short skirt, her nana who stared out of the window and didn’t say a word. When there was nothing else she told him that she missed him, and as she signed her name she stopped and listened for it – Rosa – the way it sounded on his lips. Rosa-leen, she tried to catch his accent, or was it just his voice, for hadn’t he arrived here as a boy? She sealed the envelope, wrote his address and, unable to wait till morning, ran down to the postbox, her coat over her nightdress, her feet in pumps.

  The night was warm, the street lights hazy. She turned to hare back to her front door, and there he was, leaping from a taxi. ‘Felix!’ He looked dusty and dishevelled, and as he rounded on her his eyes were cold. ‘Where have you been?’ His fingers pressed into her shoulder, and she wished she had the letter so that she could tear it open and read him the last lines.

  ‘I missed you.’ She looked back at the postbox, red and solid. ‘I sent you a letter.’

  ‘Is that right?’ There was a sharp edge of disbelief, and it was only her panic and the trim of her white nightdress that eased his mood. ‘I missed you too.’ He took her hand and, using his own key, let them both in.

  That night he made love to her in fierce and mournful style, his body burning, his eyes grown black. ‘Be careful,’ she gathered courage to say as she felt him still and gather, and then, ‘Thank you,’ as at the last moment he withdrew. She smeared the pleasing stickiness across the white skin of her stomach, and thought of Teresa’s sister who’d been with a man who’d not cared it was the wrong time of the month, and when she’d gone to him in trouble, fearful of losing her job, he’d given her the number of a woman who’d told her to shoot soap water up inside with a syringe. She’d been so bad the girl she lived with called a doctor, and the doctor had ordered her to hospital where she’d stayed so long her job had gone.

  Teresa Donnelly had started at St Joseph’s the year after Rosaleen.

  ‘God help us,’ Bridie had hissed from her bed that first night when the girl would not stop crying. ‘Sister Benedict will be in here in a flash.’

  There was a hush as the eight girls in the dormitory considered the vengeful figure of the nun, but Teresa had no idea what awaited her, was not to know that the punishment for crying was to be pulled up by the ear and slapped. Within minutes she was at it again, sobbing loud enough to wake the dead.

  ‘Shhh.’ Rosaleen slithered to the floor, and crawling – who knew who might be listening for footsteps? – she knelt beside Teresa’s bed. ‘It’s not so bad,’ her stomach hollowed at the lie, ‘once you get used to it.’

  Teresa looked at her with a tear-stained face. ‘I wrote,’ she said, ‘and told them to come and get me.’

  ‘Write again,’ Rosaleen nodded, ‘but this time,’ and she spoke quiet into her ear, ‘don’t give it to the nuns. They don’t send those letters, not if they’re sad. Write, and put it in the post yourself.’

  ‘But I’ve no stamp.’

  There was a rustle in the corridor and they both froze.

  ‘Sometimes the postman takes them anyway.’

  ‘Is that right?’ The girl looked at her, hopeful, and as Rosaleen crawled back to bed she wondered if it was wrong to give encouragement when not a single one of her own letters had got through.

  The cold had crept in between her sheets and her teeth chattered as she hunched into a ball, composing one last letter. Maybe this time . . . She imagined her mother hurrying up the steps. ‘Be quick and pack,’ she’d call to her. ‘You’ll not spend another minute in this place.’ There would be Daddy testing out the slipper on his arm. ‘Why did you say nothing?’ they’d ask as they walked out through the gates, Angela rescued from the babies, her socks unravelled, her face surprised. ‘Why did you not let us know before?’

  The next day Teresa found her, the letter in her hand. She’d drawn a stamp on the envelope, the kind face of the Queen, and on the back she’d written the address of the convent.

  ‘What if it’s sent back?’ Rosaleen worried. ‘What if the nuns read it?’

  Teresa began to giggle. She was a plump girl with a freckled face and the smallest, brightest eyes. ‘I told them Si
ster Benedict was a lizard dressed as a bat.’

  Rosaleen put a hand over her mouth.

  ‘That the Mother Superior freezes soup with a single look.’

  ‘I’ll post it for you.’ Rosaleen took a pen and scribbled out the return address. ‘There’s a gate at the back of the garden on to the main road.’ She stowed the letter under the bib of her pinafore beside one of her own.

  The following Sunday Teresa slipped her a sweet at Mass. It was a strawberry sherbet, a little fluffed on one side. ‘I saved it for you.’ Rosaleen pushed it fast into her mouth. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled around its edges, and she sucked slowly, in the hope that she could make it last through the morning hour of prayers.

  That term every girl aged eight and over was to partake in three days of prayerful silence. Three days of considering your sins. Rosaleen tore two sheets of paper from her workbook and secreted them under her vest so that in the afternoon, when they were out in the gardens with their rosary beads, she might find a spot behind the rhododendrons to distract her from the day. Now, with no one in sight, she slid a pen out of her sock. Benedict the Batwoman, she wrote, and every chance she got, she spun a tale of daring and adventure, herself and Teresa the fearless heroines, embroiled in an elaborate revenge. Rosaleen whispered the story to her new friend in instalments. ‘I could do drawings.’ Teresa’s voice, like hers, was scratchy from the days of quiet. ‘What do they look like . . . under their habits? Do they have hair? Or is it shaved?’

  Rosaleen wasn’t sure it mattered. She could see the Batwoman flying through the sky, her face with narrow lizard eyes, dragged back by her cape.

  ‘Do you think,’ Teresa whispered, ‘they keep their veils on at night, being God’s brides and that?’

  Rosaleen put her hands over her ears, but the image wouldn’t leave her.

  That night she was almost asleep when she felt a pinch on her arm. ‘Pssst. Come on then, if you’re coming.’ Teresa led her from the dormitory.

  ‘Where are we going?’ She caught hold of her friend’s hand, and Teresa ran, over the shiny floors, through the swish of swing doors, past the office and the slipper room and into the nuns’ corridor. Rosaleen’s heart was beating so hard she thought for sure somebody would hear it when they reached the nuns’ corridor.

  ‘Nothing.’ Teresa was bending to a door, her eye to the keyhole. She straightened up, and moved on to another. Almost at once she looked over at Rosaleen, her mouth a small round O.

  ‘What?’ Rosaleen whispered, but Teresa gestured for her to look. At first she could see nothing. A streak of light, a square of wall, the corner of a bed, and then she shifted her eyes sideways and there was Sister Angelica in a white nightdress, her hair loose about her shoulders. She was brushing it, slowly, thoroughly, her body swaying with the effort. ‘She’s getting ready for Himself,’ and the two girls, shocked, ran, skimming over the corridors, back to their beds.

  The next week at Confession Rosaleen’s cheeks blazed. I took a piece of bread from the refectory. I told a lie to Dolly Burke. She ran through the usual sins and was given three Hail Marys, but it was possible that Teresa had been less able to dissemble, because the next week when they snuck out of their beds, tiptoeing from door to door, pressing their eyes to keyholes, a hand came down and grasped each girl by the shoulder.

  The slipper room was where the nuns did the girls’ hair. They plaited it and tied it up with ribbons, pulling it so tight across their scalp it was impossible to sleep, but that was nothing to the slap of leather against skin, nothing beside the sickening humiliation of lying across Sister Annunciata’s lap. ‘So you’re not sorry, is that it?’ She gave Rosaleen an extra wallop. ‘You’re not sorry to be peeking and sneaking.’ Rosaleen would not cry, not since the time she’d jolted her bowl and soup had slopped out over the table. Not since she’d stood on shaking legs after the shock of that first thrashing and seen the smirk on the nun’s face as she’d wailed. Never again would she give them that pleasure, and as she lay in her bed, the welts on her skin rising, she pinched her arm and bunched her mouth into a knot.

  * * *

  Rosaleen had to ring three times before Felix answered. ‘Yes?’ His voice travelled flatly, uninviting through the grille, and she swallowed hard before she spoke. ‘I thought you might be hungry . . .’ She stepped into the road and looked up at his window for the keys to come hurtling down. ‘Careful!’ A bicycle swerved, and a car on the other side hooted as she leapt to catch them.

  It had been a week since she’d seen Felix. Working, not long now. There’d been notes in pencil with kisses roughly drawn, and on the back of one a sketch of his rumpled bed, and on another an empty plate. Rosaleen had taken this as an invitation to visit the delicatessen on Brewer Street, and with the help of the man who ran it bought some of his favourite things. Liver pâté, pickled cucumbers and a dark, seeded loaf of bread. She had a bottle of wine, and glasses wrapped in a scarf, and as she stopped on the last landing to recover her breath, she did her best to still the flutter of apprehension as to how she might be greeted when she reached the top. ‘I thought you might need—’ she started, but Felix was waiting for her, his face pale, and he shook his head and, slipping an arm around her waist, moved her bodily inside. ‘They’re coming to take them tomorrow.’ His foot was tapping, and with one distracted kiss, he took up his tools and before she could say more he’d turned to the smallest of his creatures and was chiselling the corner of its mouth.

  Rosaleen found a tin plate on which to put the bread, and using her scarf as a tablecloth she spread out the picnic. As quietly as she could, she searched for a bottle opener. She found three spoons, a rusted knife, a hammer and a ball of string. Surely if she attached the string . . . but then she saw the spiralled end of it lying on the floor. Rosaleen thought the plunk of the cork escaping might alert him, but Felix was lost to her, muttering, clearing his throat, swatting away imaginary flies. ‘No, no.’ He bent to his work. ‘That’s not it.’

  She poured herself a glass of wine and walked through to the next room. The stone man was unchanged. Knee bent, mouth open, his head so fierce and tender she stroked it as she passed. The bed was filthy, seamed with grit, as if Felix had lain between the sheets wearing his boots. She stripped them off and shook them, and as she tucked the cover over she heard the scolding voice of Sister Benedict. Hospital corners. What have I told you? The nun’s eyes swam bald behind her glasses and Rosaleen felt the stubborn jut of her lip, and the word sorry, bitten to the quick. There. She laid a hand on Felix’s quilt.

  Felix was crouched down, knocking at the chisel with a hammer. With each strike a flicker passed across his eye. Rosaleen watched, wincing with him as he blinked, and then an arrow seemed to strike him. ‘Aghh, damn that.’ He put a hand to his head.

  ‘Felix?’ But he warded her off and, with a grimace, bent to his work.

  It was dark when Rosaleen let herself out. ‘Will I see you, then, before the opening?’ She was on the landing, looking back.

  ‘What’s that?’

  She took another step away. ‘It’s all right.’ She touched her finger to her lip, the top one where he’d first kissed her, and as she ran down the stairs she wondered if tomorrow, when the figures were removed, he’d remember she was there.

  Kate

  I WAKE EARLY AND TIPTOE DOWN THE STAIRS. MY WORKROOM door is closed, the handle smeared with paint, and even as I wrap my hand around it I am soothed. Inside, the trunks of trees stretch tall on their boards. I roll up the blind and let in the first light, and loosening a hardened nub of brown, I mash my brush against the palette. I’m working on a severed branch, and with an old shirt, buttoned, I bend to the grooves of bark. This branch was once attached to the Big Oak, lost – or not entirely – but with this limb, for which it was renowned, wrenched off and slammed into the ground. It happened in the storm of ’87, three days after Freya’s birth, and as soon as the roads were clear I’d made Matt drive me back to the village where I’d grown up.

>   ‘Will we visit your parents?’ Matt had eased Freya from my arms.

  ‘No. My breasts were leaking, my body pulped, but even when we were diverted – a horse chestnut had fallen by the church – and forced to drive right past their house, I wouldn’t change my mind. Now I attempt to re-create the knots of the oak, the polished bark where I’d come to test my courage, and as I do I can feel it, the snag and bobble as the wood caught on my tights, the terror as I lay flat, my arms outstretched, the close of my eyes as I swung under and dropped.

  The last time we visited, I’d been pregnant. Triumphant, nauseous, unprepared for the blanched look on my mother’s face when we told her our news. ‘What are you planning to do?’ She drew me into the garden, and I rounded on her. ‘What’s your question? Will I keep it?’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . . Congratulations, darling.’ But when my father followed he was grinning as if he’d won some wager, as if he’d always known how I’d turn out. ‘So?’ He stood before Matthew. ‘Are you two planning to get married?’ And Matt had turned and put an arm around my shoulder and I’d loved him for it. ‘That’s between me and Kate.’