I Couldn't Love You More

by Esther Freud

  My heart is heavy but I smile. ‘I’ll love you when I’m dead too.’ I give myself bubble eyebrows and a bubble moustache. ‘And even after that.’

  ‘Forever and a million years.’

  ‘A million and one.’

  We stay in the bath until it’s time for school, trickling in hot water when the temperature cools, making lists of fives – five favourite sweets, five favourite suppers, five favourite children in her class. ‘Five favourite names,’ Freya demands and I close my eyes, using the time to tip my head into the water. ‘Freya: number one. Kate.’ I read her lips, and I smile so that water seeps into my mouth.

  ‘Catherine?’

  I test it out, but I’m trying to retrieve that other name, the one I was given first.

  ‘Grace.’ Freya adds her own middle name.

  Maybe Kate is all there is.

  * * *

  It’s only later when I’ve dropped Freya at school, reminded her it will be Celine who will be collecting her today, that I’m overrun by fear. I stare through the window of the bus, imagine I might see Matt in a side street, beaten, lost, in need of help. My stomach quakes, and then I pinch myself. I’ve been through this before, not often, but I have, and there has always been an explanation. Too tired to get the night bus. Didn’t want to call and wake me up. And that’s when I see her. My mother. She’s an old woman, hunched over, her hair grown sparse. ‘I’ll not accept it,’ she mutters to herself, ‘they can’t make me do it,’ and she balls one hand into a fist. I look away but she is there, reflected in the glass.

  A girl gets on. She glances at the empty seat and skips upstairs. Her hair is dark and straightened to a sheen, her arched eyebrow familiar as my own. I rise to follow, then catch myself, and sit back down.

  When I next look the woman has gone. There’s a stain where she’s been sitting and no one has taken her place. I huff my breath against the window. Of course she’s not my mother, and I summon up the managing director of a company, dogstooth jacket, belted skirt, standing at the head of a boardroom table while her employees sit with their pens poised to hear what she will say. I draw a face in the steam. Wide mouth, fierce eyes, and when I reach my stop I wipe it out.

  ‘ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?’ Beck looks up as I come in. He’s wearing a green shirt, the same shirt he was wearing in my dream.

  ‘Early start, that’s all.’

  He makes me coffee. Black. One sugar. ‘Thank you.’ I could cry, and I take a sip too soon and scorch my lip.

  I’ve brought along a stack of books and I set them on the table of my designated room. I unroll a poster that I found folded into the glossy segment of the paper. On it are sixteen varieties of tree. Birch, larch, hornbeam, cherry. There’s a Scots pine, a crack willow, a bright red-berried holly. Holly plants are either male or female, explaining why some never bear the familiar scarlet berries. I stand before it as my group files in, but before I can suggest what they might do, Jen has her hand up. She’s not feeling well. Jen is never feeling well. I sit beside her and ask that, before she goes back to the hostel, she copy a leaf. Mute, she points to a maple. I sit with her while she leans over it, breathing heavily as she presses her pencil down, the cuff of one sleeve riding up to reveal a fine white mesh of scars.

  Sam is standing by the poster, reading the words out loud. Silver birch. The twigs are hairless but warted and the leaves are double-toothed. He laughs, and I laugh. I have hopes for Sam.

  It helps if I draw too. I take out my sketchbook and open it. I’ve been painting animals for Freya. A hippopotamus, a leopard. Naina wheels herself closer. She says she’d like to paint a leopard but she knows hers will be shit. She demands I do the outline. ‘Why not trace it?’ I pull a sheet of paper from my book. Tracing is the perfect combination of difficult and easy, and as I watch, I see her troubled self pulled into the sharp end of the lead.

  Alec and Marjorie are both sketching the Scots pine.

  ‘I’m Scottish,’ Alec says.

  ‘I’m pining,’ Marjorie explains.

  Neil arrives late. He smells hotly of spirits. He pinches out his roll-up and puts it in his pocket. ‘Right.’ He rubs his hands together and, ignoring my suggestions, takes a pen and sketches the naked outline of a woman.

  It is only when we stop for coffee that I remember Matt. The shock of my forgetting propels me into the office, where I must log the number and the time into a ledger so that the cost of any call can be deducted from my wages. I needn’t have bothered. The answerphone clicks on. ‘Matt, it’s me. Pick up.’ I wait, and say it again, louder, and then a third time, my voice rising to such a pitch the very inside of me is rattled: ‘Matt!!’ But he’s not there, or if he is, he’s upstairs, sleeping, deaf, or dead.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I say, because I know he’s not dead, and I write 10 seconds! and I dial the number for his work. ‘Sorry,’ the receptionist tells me in her singsong voice, ‘he’s on lunch. Can I suggest that you call back?’

  I press my head against the cooling wall.

  Donica is in the foyer when I emerge. It’s been three months since she was enrolled into the class, but as yet she hasn’t ventured through the door. A large, hunched woman, she rustles through the flock of plastic bags she carries with her at all times. ‘Will you be joining us today?’ I ask as casually as I can manage, but Donica continues sorting, and when I try again she kisses her teeth and looks away.

  I release the CD player from a locked cupboard and plug it in so that the first strains of the music swell as my people trail in from the yard. All through that afternoon we listen, Bob Marley, Eurythmics, David Bowie, Wham, spiralling up on a rush of Dolly Parton, proclaiming she will always love us, always, so that soon we’re warbling and screeching as we sketch and smudge and colour.

  Rosaleen

  WHEN ROSALEEN ARRIVED AT THE FRENCH PUB WITH HER NEWS, Felix was surrounded by people. There was the tall man, who she now knew to be a film-maker, and his wife, Anastasia, a loud, chaotic woman whose name her husband had suggested she change to that of his first wife. There was a photographer, mostly silent, who, if everyone was drunk enough, raised his camera to capture them with a click.

  ‘Another glass,’ Felix called to the proprietor, and as Rosaleen waited for her drink Anastasia put an arm around her and kissed her smokily on the cheek. ‘Doesn’t she look darling,’ she proclaimed, and she began to whisper about a really rather horrible man she’d had sex with in the toilets of the Gargoyle Club. ‘He smelt dirty as a bike chain. I can’t get him out of my mind.’

  Felix held a glass of champagne out to Rosaleen and they pressed into a circle. ‘Cheers!’ they clinked and Felix lowered his voice and told them his stone man had sold. Rosaleen reached up to him, thrilling with this unexpected luck, but rather than bend to her she found that he was tensed. The sinews of his arms were taut, heat scorched through his shirt. ‘Felix?’ she tried, but he had turned away.

  Others crowded in. An artist with a fading bruise, his boyfriend – Love and Hate tattooed on his knuckles. ‘Congratulations,’ the word was passed around. Stone Man. Sold.

  Later they flocked from the pub, and waltzed along the street to the restaurant. ‘Mr Lichtman.’ Henry the barman came out to greet them, and he suggested the oysters, fresh in from Wexford, and what would they start with, three bottles of champagne? They’d hardly sat down when others joined them, a girlfriend of Anastasia’s, and a man with a lopsided smile. An adjoining table was pushed against theirs, more oysters ordered, more champagne. There was bread in baskets, butter in pale furls. Anastasia wanted steak, and so did her husband. An actor asked for lobster, the photographer soup, and Rosaleen watched as Felix’s fee was almost certainly devoured. What would it cost, she wondered, to have a baby? An article she’d read, an interview with an Unmarried Mother, swam into her mind. The girl, nineteen, pictured with her smiling naked toddler, reported her life to be ‘super’. What does anyone need anyway, she’d said, apart from love?

  ‘What are you smiling about?’
It was the artist, whose bruised face did nothing to disguise his sharpness.

  Rosaleen flushed. ‘I was thinking’ – she had no idea what she was going to say – ‘how glad I am to be here in London. Now. In this new decade.’

  There was a silence, and everyone held up their drinks. ‘The sixties,’ the artist said, and when he’d drained his glass he threw it at the wall.

  Henry rushed out, his face turned red. ‘I’ll cover it,’ Felix said, nodding, and Henry crept away, returning with a dustpan and brush, with which he carefully, tenderly swept up the shards.

  Soon the cloth was dense with glasses, trails of spinach, spills of wine. Anastasia was whispering into the tattooed boy’s ear, while the tall man leant across the table and talked intently about film to the man with the lopsided smile. Felix and the artist were discussing a fight. The elegance with which the men danced around each other, the pulpy swelling of their blackened eyes. A realm of tiredness descended on Rosaleen. She slipped away and found the ladies’ and sat there on the toilet seat. She knew the others would soon move on to a club, the Gargoyle or the Colony, and although she longed for nothing more than to go home, it wasn’t safe tonight, of all nights, to let Felix go alone.

  ‘You all right in there?’ It was Anastasia, twisting the handle. ‘I’m bursting.’ She pulled open the door which Rosaleen had failed to lock. ‘Hey’ – her face softened when she saw her – ‘what’s up with you then, duck?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just . . . I’m . . .’ There were tears on her face.

  ‘You’re just what?’ A knowing look sobered her. ‘Happens to the best of us. Come round to me, and I’ll give you a number. I’ve got a woman, she’ll sort you out.’

  ‘No, it’s not . . .’ Rosaleen flushed.

  ‘It’s all right. She’s good. And not as dear as some. Don’t wait too long or she’ll charge extra. Happened to me last time. Bloody cleaned me out.’ She winced then, and a shadow darkened her. ‘Now get a move on or you’ll have to fetch a mop.’

  Rosaleen dabbed at her eyes with water and patted them dry while Anastasia, whose real name, it came to her, was Phyllis, sang to drown out the sound of her pissing. ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be, three old ladies locked in the lavatory, They were there from Monday to Saturday . . .’

  Daddy used to sing it when he was in a good mood, and Rosaleen remembered something the unmarried girl had said. My father has been very supportive. I don’t know what I’d have done without his help.

  ‘. . . Nobody knew they were there.’

  Anastasia bustled out of the cubicle. ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be.’ They smiled at each other in the mirror. ‘Don’t bother with all the gin and cod liver oil business, even falling down the stairs. I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work.’ Without washing her hands, she held open the door.

  THE SALE OF STONE MAN catapulted Felix to a new level of success. A private collector made a bid for several of the creatures, but Felix was determined they remain together, and after some negotiation they were bought by an American museum as a flock. Felix responded by going to ground. He ordered a block of marble and spent all day and half the night winching it up on its cradle of ropes and staring at it. He turned it, lowered it, ran his hands over the rough surface. Sometimes he took a point chisel and burst away a corner, and then he faltered. ‘What’s in there, I don’t see,’ he muttered as if the image was already lurking, and Rosaleen swallowed in case it was her he was addressing. ‘Come on, that’s it.’ His forehead was creased, his eyes two boreholes, and Rosaleen, who’d hoped they might go out for supper, turned away, nibbling on the dry black bread she’d taken to eating to settle her stomach.

  ‘Did they pay you huge amounts of money?’ she tried later, hoping to cheer him with the facts, but he continued feeling for the seams of stone and told her the money was of no interest – it was the gallery who’d taken the gamble, it was only right they had the bulk of the reward.

  Rosaleen walked through to the next room and lay down on the bed. Her breasts pricked and itched against her bra. The single mother, she remembered, had tucked her baby to sleep in a drawer, had lived on meat pies from a vending machine, had used Milton to soak the nappies, and when they became too grey had dyed them pink. She’d fed the child on National Dried Milk. Super, she’d declared the whole experience to be.

  When she woke Felix had curled himself around her. ‘My love,’ she murmured, but his limbs were restless, and before she could turn to him and whisper that she had some news, he was up and through to the next room, pacing round his block of marble, staring, unblinking, to see what it contained.

  FOR A WHOLE WEEK Rosaleen left him alone. She met her friend Michele, who mentioned she looked pale, and when she went to Auntie Mavis for her lunch she pinched her cheeks and smiled between each mouthful.

  ‘I have something to tell . . . to say . . .’ Rosaleen practised as she walked towards the British Museum. ‘I’ve been wanting . . . I need . . .’ She rang the bell, hopeful, but as soon as she heard the cool flat tones, ‘Hello’ – more of a warning than a welcome – her heart sank.

  Tonight she didn’t try and catch the keys, but let them smash into the gutter. Slowly, heavily, she walked up the five flights of stairs.

  ‘What is it?’ Felix stood, bemused, in the doorway, a rasp in one hand, a hammer in the other.

  Her mouth was dry, fear fizzed along her arms, but she had no words left other than to tell him. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  Felix dropped his tools.

  ‘What?’ She was laughing as he fell to his knees.

  ‘You are?’ He pressed his ear against her coat and she listened with him to the galloping of her blood. When he looked up his eyes were wet. ‘It’s mine?’

  Rosaleen cuffed the dark crop of his head. ‘What did you—’

  Grinning, he swooped her off the ground. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I’m saying now.’

  He walked them through to the empty room and fell with her on to the bed. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘it’s cold. I’d light a fire, if there was any fuel . . .’ He peeled off her dress, her slip, her stockings, trailed a finger over the small rise of her belly. ‘I thought it was the oysters that were fattening you up.’

  ‘It wasn’t the oysters, as it happened.’ His touch was so light it sent shivers through her. ‘Whatever the nuns would have us believe.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ and he kissed the bone of her shoulder, butterflies fluttering, warming her with the sharp scratch of his chin.

  Afterwards she pulled the quilt around them, the spines of feathers catching at their skin, and Felix slept, his head thrown back, his limbs abandoned. Did he know, as she did, the moment it had happened? She wondered if they might give their child a French name. Celeste, she’d always liked that. Emile. She lay against his shoulder and allowed herself to dream.

  ‘Damn.’ Felix woke with a start, squinting through the window at the fading light. ‘I need to get on.’ He pulled on a sock, but as he reached for his shirt, a flash cracked against his eye.

  ‘What is it?’

  He stayed still, one arm warding her off, the other pressed to his forehead. ‘Nothing.’ He forced a smile. ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘Felix.’ She followed him, naked. ‘Can you stop a moment . . .’

  He turned to her, a beat of anger, and then he froze. ‘That’s it.’

  She was shivering.

  ‘Of course. Stay there.’ He dashed back into the bedroom and returned dragging the quilt cover and an old stained pillow out of its case. ‘Sit here. Can you do that? Sideways.’ He tugged at the rope pulley and lifted the block of marble so enthusiastically it swung.

  Rosaleen didn’t dare speak, only watched him as he took the only chair and, flinging it on to its side, stamped it into splinters with his boot. He flung the shards into the fireplace, adding the scrunched pages of a newspaper.

  ‘Better?’ he asked as it flamed, and then he started, taking up his point chisel
, swimming through the stone.

  Rosaleen sat still. Even her breathing she kept shallow.

  ‘Yes,’ Felix muttered. He was rasping, smoothing a corner to a curve, and she stared out of the window at the blackening night, wondering when they’d stop for supper. The fire had smouldered into embers. He threw in a bevelled leg and watched it spit.

  ‘Felix?’ She caught him. ‘Do you have anything at all that I could eat?’

  He shook himself and looked around. ‘Of course.’ To her surprise he opened the door to the oven and, reaching in, brought out a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, a small bowl of tomatoes. They sat together before the fire and ate.

  ‘Ready?’ He leapt up as she licked the crumbs from her fingers, and she resumed her position, sitting back on her heels, her stomach rounded, her nipples hardening with cold.

  Now Felix wanted to see her every night. He caught the coalman on his rounds and filled the scuttle, and each time he passed through Covent Garden market he lifted a crate which he cracked apart for kindling. There was always bread in the oven cupboard, tins of anchovies, jars of olives, capers. That first Saturday Rosaleen made cauliflower cheese and brought it to heat through, but when she’d removed the items she found the oven didn’t work. They ate it cold. It had never tasted more delicious, or was it that she was always hungry? One night she arrived from work to find that he’d bought oysters, and was prising them open with his chisel.

  Time raced and slowed as he worked his way into the stone, rasping and tapping, smoothing away edges, revealing a knee, an elbow. Rosaleen watched as he turned the marble on its harness, setting it down, releasing hands, wrists, the drop of her chin. She didn’t speak – it was as much as she could do to hold the pose – but slowly, as her body showed itself, the tilt of her hips, her belly swelling, he began to talk. He told her about the school he’d attended in Berlin, the seriousness with which he took his studies, his family’s determination he choose medicine. He described how he’d seen Hitler in the street, a small man surrounded by his guard, and when he’d returned home and told his mother she’d put a hand before his eyes as if to wipe away the sight. Once in London, his father, a biologist, had found it impossible to get work, although his mother, who’d played the violin professionally, took a job in a canteen. He was seventeen when they arrived, eighteen when the war began, and he and his father had been interned, first on the Isle of Man, and then sent by ship to Australia, where the conditions were so harsh – Felix faltered and for once his hands were still – his father could not survive the voyage. It was in a camp there that he began to carve. He’d found wood from an abandoned piano and used it to make a series of reliefs. It eased his mind, stopped him from worrying about his mother, although on his return, when he told her that he would no longer be pursuing medicine, she took to her bed and mourned.