by Jane Healey
‘The old dairy,’ I decided. ‘Wait here, I’ll get paper and pencils.’
The dairy back then hadn’t been made fit for living; it was only a storehouse with crumbling whitewashed walls and a smell of must and mould. But the light was bright through the windows on a summer’s day, and no one would come looking there and find us.
‘How do you want me then?’ Stuart asked, sitting on an old armchair he had dragged in front of a wall. He was bracketed by rusting farm equipment on one side and two cannibalized bicycles on the other.
I sat on a narrow stool, my pad of cheap paper held awkwardly in my lap.
Stuart took his shirt off, pulled it up with his arms crossed over like men did, his back arching. He had a faint line of dark hair from his navel to his trousers, the first button of which was undone.
I dropped my pencil, picked it up. He leaned his arm on the back of the chair. ‘So?’
‘Like that is fine to start,’ I said. I straightened the paper, made a mark in the corner to check the pencil and then rubbed it out, brushing away the rubbings with the back of my hand. I felt more confident now, pencil in hand, canvas at the ready. ‘You’re all right to stay still for a bit?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding and then stopping his movement sharply.
I was in control, I told myself. In control of him as my model, of the scene, and of the portrait, of my pencil.
I began to sketch, glancing up at him and then down at the page, measuring the angles with a thumb on my pencil and one eye closed. My movements sped up and I sank into the zone of drawing, somewhere deeper than thought, seeing shadow and line and colour and light and shade. My eyes skimming across the planes of his muscles, noting the ridges of veins and tendons, the flecks of hair.
‘Am I doing good?’ he asked.
He had chosen to look just over my shoulder, so that when I looked down and saw him from my periphery it seemed he was looking right at me. But I was barely conscious of that, I was only thinking of the shape emerging from my white page.
‘Perfect,’ I said, rubbing a finger along a line to smudge it, to soften the line, to quicken the image into life.
*
In the afternoon, I can’t find Maeve. She isn’t in her room or the bathroom, the drawing room or the kitchen, and she isn’t with the twins where I’ve left them sprawled in front of a video in the living room.
I take the folded laundry up to our bedroom and put it away in the chest of drawers, glancing out across the front lawn.
Alex knocks on the doorframe as he enters, an old habit, and I realize with a start that it’s another Saturday.
‘The lawn needs cutting,’ I say.
I hate that as parents our greetings to one another have become lists of things to do, which contain within them pleas for help or admonishments, passive aggressive digs or expressions of absolute weariness, of I-cannot-do-this-I-cannot-keep-going. Like the first time the both of us were back at the flat after Maeve’s pneumonia and her near miss with death, and how I had said, The fridge needs clearing out, and he had said, The bins smell, and we had looked at each other with a bewildered, astonished hurt.
‘I’ll do it later,’ he says.
‘And I can’t find Maeve, I don’t think she’s in the house.’
‘She’ll be out in the gardens, I’m sure she’s fine. We have to let her be, remember. Not hover over her.’
‘I’m trying. I’m worried about her.’
‘Try not to worry,’ he says, putting his hands on my shoulders.
Does he have any suggestions for how to do that beyond the platitude? I wonder tiredly.
‘Summer’s treating you well.’ He touches the freckles on my shoulder.
The house is quiet, the sun a warm glow outside. Alex kisses me. I clutch the front of his t-shirt as a way to keep some space between us.
‘I need to make dinner.’ I move my head away.
‘We don’t have any guests tonight, it’s just us.’
‘The twins have been too quiet, they’ll be up to something.’
When Maeve was an inpatient, and the twins were good nappers, Alex and I would sometimes have sex with the curtains open, move so harshly in a delirium of frustration and grief that I would get carpet burns on my knees, that his wrists would bruise. That’s the way we’ve always done it since the first few months of playful exploration at university when we were both young and sweet – him on his back and me on top, holding him down with my weight or with the grip of my hands, and sometimes saying, What if someone could see us, you, like this, to make him groan. I like control, I guess, and he likes to give it up, at least in the bedroom. I used to think I was lucky to find a man like that, that our preferences fitted, but now the thought of touching him, or worse, of him touching me, leaves me cold.
‘You know, you could just say that you don’t want to,’ he says, with a hurt smile. The cruelty of knowing someone so well, of us being married so long, I sometimes think, is how easy it is to hurt one another.
‘My head just isn’t there.’
‘When will it be? I’m sorry, but it’s been months. I didn’t press you before with your dad’s funeral and everything, I’m not a monster.’
‘I know you’re not. I’m just tired, honestly, truly. I keep having these dreams.’
‘Then see someone.’
‘I’m not a machine to be fixed. I don’t imagine everything up here,’ I tap my temple, ‘will get fixed with a few sessions of talking to some insipid counsellor. And where would I find one out here in the sticks anyway?’
He turns his back to me, opens his bedside drawer as if he’s looking for something. ‘At least it’s nice to have Stuart here.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’
I stare at the open door once he’s left the room, screwing up my face with something like scorn.
The twins have an early dinner today and Maeve leaves the table halfway through, complaining of a headache. I watch her go: the awkwardness of her movements as she steps through the back door, the way she clicks the fingers of one hand against one another in a nervous tic. It seems that now she is well, she is accelerating through her lost teen years, moody and sullen. I feel for her, especially with the hospital trip tomorrow. Maybe I can make her a chocolate torte afterwards, like the one I did for her last birthday, when she told me it was the best cake she’d ever eaten and looked at me like I’d hung the moon. I used to listen to other mothers talk about their prickly daughters and think that I had got so lucky, that somehow I, a mother who had been motherless herself, had miraculously done a good job with her. But now I can see it was her illness that caused her to cleave so strongly to me, to us as a family. That she had no reserves left to bond with the rest of the world, no energy to differentiate herself from her kin as teenagers are supposed to do. If you face death every day, a part of you stays childish, clings to a motherly figure as if you’re an infant again. That’s not to say there were never any arguments, that Maeve was never rude or sullen or mean, it’s just that those moods never lasted all that long – she’d say something cruel, then reach out for my hand and clutch it desperately, and say she was sorry.
Stuart is watching me when I turn my attention back to the table.
‘Is she OK?’ he asks.
‘Just worried about tomorrow, I think. She’s going for some tests at the hospital, just a check-up.’
‘I bet you’re both sick of hospitals by now.’
‘Just a bit,’ Alex replies, tipping up his wine glass.
It’s late and we’ve lit four assorted candles on the table, old ones we found in the back of a cupboard.
Stuart dips his fingers into the wax of the one between us, lifts them out and watches the wax harden pale as Alex scoffs at him.
‘I was thinking about drawing you,’ I say to Stuart.
‘I’d be up for that, a revisitation.’
‘I meant in the past,’ I correct, ‘I was remembering drawing you—’
‘So I’m too old now? My body too weathered?’ He pouts. ‘Ruth used to draw me,’ he tells Alex. ‘Life drawings, you know, she was going to apply to art school.’
‘You were? I don’t remember that.’ Alex reaches for the second bottle of wine.
Did I never mention that to him at university? So much of those years is a haze. I wouldn’t have brought it up often, not wanting to be reminded of the girls and my photography, but not to mention it even once is impressive. Or perhaps he just doesn’t remember. I’m sure it was the same for him, anyway, that Alex has kept secrets too, whether inconsequential or not.
‘I wasn’t totally naked, I hasten to add.’ Stuart holds up his hands, looking anything but contrite.
‘You should take him up on his offer, Ruth,’ Alex says.
I look at him but there doesn’t seem to be anything more to his words, even with his odd conversation change earlier. ‘I wouldn’t be any good. It’s decades since I’ve drawn anything.’
‘You won’t get better unless you try.’
‘Well, I can’t argue with that logic.’ I get up from my seat, gather the plates and cutlery, the fat of the lamb chops congealed in smears in the grooves of the plate rim. I feel like I’ve been pressured into doing something I didn’t even want. But then maybe they can see how stifled I am by the house, maybe it’s just a nudge for me to do something for myself for once.
I take the opportunity to go upstairs and check on Maeve. Her door is closed but there’s no light leaking from the bottom when I switch off the light in the hall, no radio playing.
‘Maeve?’ I ask softly, but she doesn’t answer.
I think of when she was critically ill in hospital, how I could simply watch the monitors to know how her heart was, how much oxygen she had. How she could press a button to call a nurse or a doctor who would know what to do to stop her pain, while I stood helpless beside her bed.
Chapter Fifteen
It was hot when they left the house but in the car to the station, Maeve feels cold. She stares out at the countryside; yellow fields of rapeseed, hedges and trees whipping past. She wishes that Stuart could have somehow come with them, or that he could have just taken her. Her mother’s voice is too bright today, her smile too nervous, and Maeve keeps catching the movement of her blonde bob as she glances over at her.
On the train the wind of the open window tugs past Maeve’s face; the carpet seat itches even through her jeans as her eyes skim the newspaper her mother handed over – the latest opinion pieces on Diana, arguments between Britpop bands, and an artist’s impression of the lander on the fiery barren surface of Mars.
The hospital is familiar, horrifyingly so, and there are familiar faces too, nurses and receptionists, parents of other patients, who say hi to her, who tell her she looks good. It’s the look of the parents that’s the worst, their tremulous hope, their eyes running over her for some sign of health they might be able to find in their own child if they only search carefully.
Usually her mother comes with her for tests but she tells her, and the nurse who comes to escort them, that she’d rather be on her own today. When Maeve looks back as she’s led away, her mother’s strained smile, her clutch on her handbag, feels like a physical hurt.
She changes into a robe first and can’t help comparing it to changing into the beautiful dress for Stuart, soft and lovely, not draughty and scratchy. She feels vulnerable as she steps on the scale in the nurse’s office and then stands with her back against the wall so she can record her height, as she puts the cold thermometer under her tongue, as she sits on the chair and the blood pressure cuff bites into her upper arm.
‘Good,’ the nurse repeats. The kind of good that means Maeve did well following instructions, that she is being a good patient.
Next, blood is taken. Maeve watches it fill up the plastic tubes, one after the other. Do you want all of it? she wants to say. Will you leave me anything for myself?
She sits on the couch in a different room and the doctor, an old man with white wisps of hair and thin hands, searches her body for any signs the leukaemia might have returned, asking her to move the neck of her gown so he can hear her heart. She lies back as he presses his hands into her abdomen, the hinge of her jaw, asking if she is tender anywhere, if it hurts.
It hurts everywhere, she wants to say, even though it doesn’t.
The last test she has is a chest X-ray, shuffling into the room that always has a strange appearance of abandonment. She clutches the handles as she’s told, holds a breath as the disembodied voices tell her that she’s doing well, instructing her to turn and breathe in again.
She dresses and returns to the doctor’s office, and her mother joins her.
‘OK?’ she asks, and Maeve nods.
‘We’ll get the results of the blood test within the week,’ the doctor says, ‘and order a bone marrow sample if needed then, but I can’t see any physical symptoms at the moment so there’s no need to be concerned. You look a bit peaky, but I’m sure that’s just being a teenager and spending all your time inside,’ he adds to Maeve.
‘She’s fatigued sometimes,’ her mother says, placing a hand on her shoulder.
‘She will be, after what she went through. The body needs time to recover. But no symptoms beyond that?’
Maeve shakes her head.
‘That’s us then,’ he says.
He shakes her mother’s hand and then Maeve’s. His skin is papery and dry. ‘Now promise me you won’t go home and worry about it until the tests come back in,’ he says. ‘You look like a worrier.’
He’s a new doctor, he’s inherited her case from her last who has gone on maternity leave. If you had almost died, you would worry too, she wants to tell him. But she is a good patient, quiet, polite, easy to handle.
‘That wasn’t so bad, was it,’ her mother says, as they leave the hospital and walk to the Tube station.
‘Maybe for you.’
‘Maeve,’ she says, her face creasing in pain.
‘Sorry. I’m just tired. All those fluorescent lights.’
‘We’ll stop off at the bakery at Charing Cross, get you a pastry.’
A treat, just like the countless small offerings she was given by her parents during her illness. She’s seen the younger children at the hospital perform elaborate charades thanking their giftees, knowing even at their tender age that the present was more for them – parents, relatives – than the patient. That sweets and toys and books were small tokens of control, of guilt and penitence.
‘Only if you get something too,’ Maeve says.
Her taste buds were changed by the chemotherapy, just like her hair, and now everything sweet tastes fuzzy and wrong. So she chooses a cheese pastry, the filling hot and oozing when they sit down in their seats. But she still feels cold. And as the train rolls dizzyingly fast past power lines and trees, stations and houses, she thinks of the symptoms she didn’t bother mentioning to the doctor. That she’s tired, that she bruises, that she gets headaches. That last week her left elbow hurt all day even though she didn’t remember hitting it on anything. That she finds it hard to sleep, that in her dreams she keeps choking, drowning.
It’s only when the car turns into the long drive through the fields to the hamlet that Maeve realizes a part of her had thought they were returning to the flat in London, the one with the tiny bedroom painted pink and the shelves that her dad built her, the comforting yellow glow of the city sneaking under the too-short curtains and the consoling sound of life being lived outside the cocoon of her room. Her parents spoke of nature when they said they were moving out here, of the greenness, the life, but if there is anything living here besides the bees and wasps and the occasional soaring bird, besides the mute grass and hedges and trees, then Maeve hasn’t found it.
The front of the house, grey stone and ivy such a dark green the depths appear black, looks austere, as cold as she feels inside, and when she looks at it she thinks that the moment they go inside her mother will disappear
off to another room and Maeve will be left alone in the quiet.
‘Will you be all right on your own for a bit until Dad gets home?’ her mother asks, as they round the lawn and park in front of the house. ‘I’ll walk to pick up the twins from Mrs Quinn’s and I want to stay for a coffee to chat, pick her brain about house stuff. Stuart is here,’ she nods to Stuart’s car, a battered silver, too small to be a family car, ‘so you can knock on the annexe door if you need anything.’
‘I’m fine, Mum. I’m not a baby,’ Maeve says, her voice pitched sullen even though her heart is racing.
‘Well done today,’ her mother says again as Maeve leaves the car, leaning over the passenger seat so that she catches Maeve’s eye. ‘I mean it. You’re so much more put together than I was at your age. Stronger. There’s good things for you to come, Maeve, I know it. The world owes you.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
As her mother walks back along the path to their front gate, Maeve unlocks the front door, screwing up her face against a sudden wave of tears. How is she stronger than any other girl? she thinks. And why is it that her mother’s love, these tender hopeful moments of honesty and admiration from her, seems to hurt so much?
In the house she only stops to strip from her jeans and top, trying to change so quickly that she stumbles, that she swears at herself. Back in a summer dress, and without a bra, she runs back downstairs and out the front, sharp quick steps across the gravel to his door.
She knocks and he opens it as if he’s been waiting for her.
‘Hi,’ he says.
‘Hi. Can I come in? My mum’s over at the neighbour’s.’
‘Of course.’
In her bedroom as she changed she had imagined they wouldn’t even say anything, that he would invite her inside with a hand on her back and then – and then—
‘I was at the hospital today,’ she says.
She’s only a step away from him. She can smell the cigarette he’s just had, the tea.
‘I know. Did it go OK?’
‘Fine.’ She shrugs.
He puts a hand on her arm and her shoulders loosen. He pulls her into him and hugs her and she clutches at his t-shirt, feeling the solid warmth of him, the scratch of his stubble on her neck, the planes of his chest and stomach. Does he feel the press of her breasts? If she pushed further, if her hips met his, would she feel something there?