The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  Vanessa’s mother had auburn hair. But did she? Weren’t there photos of her scattered about the house at Oakley, photos from when she was young, photos of her with Vanessa’s father, and with her children when they were small, and didn’t she have fair hair then? They were black-and-white photos, from what I remember, but even so, you could tell. Auburn hair would have come out darker, much darker in a photograph.

  So I stare at this hair and I’m wondering, and I’m looking for clues. We walk the length of the house, through the kitchen and another short connecting hallway and into a sort of small sitting room right at the back. Vanessa’s house was modern and bright, but this place is so dark and enclosed, and there is a strange, cloying smell that I can’t quite place. She gestures for me to sit and so I do, on the edge of a small leather sofa that is cracked and peeling along its arms. The seat of it creaks and gives under me, the cushion letting out its breath on a sigh. There is a large, pale rug on the floor and I rest my feet on it nervously, afraid that my boots will leave marks. I try to compose myself. I am desperate to look around, but I can’t while she is standing there observing me.

  Eventually she says, ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  And I say, ‘Oh, thank you so much, a glass of water would be lovely.’

  It is too hot in the room and as soon as she is gone, I stand up and take off my coat, but then I think that that might look presumptuous, as if I am making myself too at home, so I put it back on again. I can hear her in the kitchen, taking out glasses and running the tap. Quickly I glance around, but there is not much to see. The room is pretty small, with just these two mismatched sofas, each pitched at an angle to each other, and a rectangular, dark-wood side table between them at one end, so that the three items make a sort of triangle: sofa, table, sofa. And behind the table, with not enough room to get around there and open it, is a lone and heavily curtained glass-panelled door, leading on to the darkness of the garden. There is a tall lamp with a nondescript gold shade in one corner, and against the wall behind my sofa is a bookcase, but I can see nothing of interest on it: no photos, no give-away clues. All in all, it is a pretty characterless space, and I wonder why she chose to bring me here, all the way to the back of the house, rather than into the living room at the front, with the bay overlooking the street. Somehow I think that is the room I would have liked to have seen.

  When she returns from the kitchen I am perched on my seat again, with my hands clutched in my lap. And I have been rehearsing my speech in my head.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say as she puts two glasses of water complete with ice and lemon on the table. And then she carefully sits herself opposite me, and looks at me, and waits.

  ‘I must apologize for just turning up like this,’ I say. ‘You must think me very strange.’ I smile, and she smiles back, but it is a polite smile, giving nothing away. ‘The other day I was in the cafe by the station,’ I say, ‘when you left your card. And I heard them say your name – Mrs Reiber—’ I break off. How am I to continue without giving away the fact that I followed her? She sits so still before me, impassive, waiting for me to go on. ‘Well, I . . . It’s just it’s such an unusual name, and I knew someone called Vanessa Reiber a long time ago, and I thought, I wondered . . .’

  Her face is totally expressionless. Suddenly I am overwhelmed by the terrible fear that I may have got this all wrong. There is a long, awkward silence during which all I can hear is my heart, banging against my ribs. It is so hot in the room and the atmosphere is close and airless. My skin prickles under my dress and I can feel my feet starting to swell inside my boots. Eventually Mrs Reiber turns her head to look in the direction of the glass door, across which the curtains are still partially drawn. There is a faint, thin smile on her mouth, but I feel that this is a fixed expression, worn like a mask, and as I study her I see a quick, fleeting frown cross her eyes.

  ‘Dear me,’ she says. ‘I think we are in for more rain.’ And then she turns back to me and asks, ‘Did you have to come far?’

  ‘No, not too far. I – I live in Surbiton.’

  She smiles, she nods, as though this is of some interest to her, as though we are here to make small talk. And I am thrown by this. I wonder if she is – well, confused. I feel that perhaps I should just give up and leave, and yet . . . and yet, I can’t.

  I swallow back my doubts and say, ‘Please don’t be offended. And well, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I knew Vanessa. Vanessa Reiber. I was a friend, sort of. I was Leanne’s friend, and I came to the house a few times, in Oakley. When Vanessa died I was very . . . sad.’ How pathetic I sound. And if this woman is Vanessa’s mother, what on earth do I expect her to say to that? Suddenly I wonder what it is that I am trying to achieve. ‘I was very fond of Vanessa,’ I say and I pinch my nails into my hands. Fond? What kind of a word is that? ‘When I heard your name I thought – Vanessa’s mother was called Yolande. Yolande Reiber.’

  She listens to my speech with that mask-smile fixed firmly in place. But she says nothing; not that she is Yolande Reiber, not that she isn’t. I don’t know what to do. I feel such helplessness, spiralling inside my head.

  ‘And if you were her mother, I just wanted you to know that I thought Vanessa was special. Very special.’ That lump is swelling up inside my throat again. I swallow hard to contain it.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to say so,’ Mrs Reiber says. ‘But I am afraid that you have had a wasted journey. I do not have a daughter.’ I stare at her and she stares back, her eyes unreadable.

  ‘But—’ I start, but she cuts me short.

  ‘And I never have had.’ She says it with such finality. And to make sure that I realize the conversation is now over, she breaks my stare and looks back out at the garden. ‘I do hope you make it home before the rain,’ she says.

  I walk away from that house feeling numb. I am too miserable for words. It is raining now, that low-cloud persistent rain that looks as though it’s not much more than a heavy drizzle, but in fact gets you soaked. I do have an umbrella in my bag, but I cannot be bothered to get it out and the rain is working its way through my hair to my head, where I can feel it trickling against my scalp. My boots are killing me now, pinching and rubbing against my toes; every step is a punishment, but it’s a punishment I make myself endure. I feel I deserve it for being such a fool.

  I walk to the end of the road and turn right, not really thinking which way I should be going. I have nothing particularly to do; no need to be anywhere until later this afternoon, when Jono comes home. And now I feel totally robbed of the day’s purpose. I end up at the road leading to the station, where all those lovely shops are, and I cross over and walk towards them. The Christmas lights are on, even at this time of day, inside the shop windows and outside too, draped around the lamp posts. All very tasteful, but then of course it would be, here. I am too wet to go inside the shops so I just walk slowly, and look in the windows. And once again I feel myself to be outside life, looking in. At the gift shop I stop, and I look at the beautiful jewellery and the leather bags so artfully displayed. And then I catch sight of my reflection, of my glum, distorted face and my hair stuck wetly to my head, and I am overcome with a wave of self-loathing.

  Who am I to try and link my life to Vanessa’s – then, or now? I am just a middle-aged woman out of nowhere. I am what you become when you disappear.

  I turn away from the shops and then cross back over the main road, and head back in the general direction of my car. And I try to walk tall, with dignity, as if I have the right to these streets, whilst inside I feel like an impostor. Niggling through my self-pity now is anger, worming its way like a thread.

  Let us not forget that Vanessa’s mother never did notice me. I may have been in her house on various occasions; I may have sat on her furniture, laughed with her children, drunk the booze in her dining room, but she always walked past me as if I didn’t exist.

  And she didn’t invite me to the funeral.

  And that woman back there, that Mrs Reiber �
�� she was lying. She is Vanessa’s mother. I know it. I know it in my bones.

  It feels like the hugest of snubs.

  I tuck the hurt up inside me where it festers and throbs like a deep, hidden boil. And I go about my life, as I always do. This is such a busy time of year and there is so much that I have to do. I make my lists. There are cards to be sent, there is food shopping to plan and buy, presents still to be bought and wrapped, as well as things for the house to be done: new napkins to be chosen and something festive for the table, the decorations to be brought down and updated where necessary, bed linen to be aired and ironed for the spare room in which Andrew’s mother will stay. All this as well as so many school things to attend to: rugby matches to pick up from, the end-of-term art exhibition, the concert, and so on. I write things on my calendar and systematically I cross them off again, as evidence of my validity. And I tell myself that I could not possibly do all this and work.

  Vaguely, like whispering ghosts at the corner of my mind, I remember a time when Christmas was all about lunches and parties and actually having a good time, instead of merely trying to buy one in the endless queues of supermarkets and department stores. But that was before.

  I did work. Even after Jono was born. Not full-time then, but three days a week. For three days a week I catalogued antiques at an auction house in Burlington Gardens, and I was still me. I put Jono in the nursery and caught the train and then the Tube to my office in Piccadilly, with nothing in my arms except my handbag. I could have been anyone, then, and when there was just me, I thought I was someone. When I became pregnant again I saw no reason not to carry on. I had it all, as they say, back then: husband, family, career. I had the best of everything.

  But when I lay on that hospital bed with my belly all slimed up with gel, with the midwife pressing the scanner into my flesh and dragging it about while she frowned at the screen in silence, I felt my life stop, like the hands of a clock. I’d felt so buoyant, so confident until then. I remember that I looked at Andrew for reassurance, but he wouldn’t look back at me; he was staring at the screen with his eyes, and the skin on his face seeming to be drawn back in a parody of cartoon shock. I wanted almost to laugh. I wanted to scream, No, no, you’ve got it wrong, everything is fine. And I wanted to slap the midwife, who was now leaning over me with a little trumpet thing like a kid’s toy held to her ear, which she moved about on my stomach, listening, listening. Pressing it down, listening. For how long was she going to do this? Her hair, which was long and dark and tied back in a ponytail, fell forward and strands of it stuck to the gunk on my stomach and dragged, like seaweed, as she moved.

  ‘I can’t find a heartbeat,’ she said at last, and I did slap her then, and I did scream.

  I couldn’t go back to work. I couldn’t bear to see all those familiar faces, avoiding mine. I couldn’t make that journey, walk those familiar privileged streets so alive with certainty and optimism; I couldn’t go back. That part of my life was over. It was dead, burnt in an incinerator in some far corner of the hospital grounds.

  I couldn’t leave Jono at the nursery. I just couldn’t do it. At first, I clung to Andrew and I cried and cried and he held me, and did his best to comfort me. He never said, You have to; he never pushed me out, back into the world, back onto the bicycle, so to speak, that I had so catastrophically fallen off. He just held me. And he said it was okay, although it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.

  And so we turned our eyes to Jono. I became the full-time mother I had never wanted to be, but I could see no other way. I knew – we both knew – that if we looked away for even a second, we could lose him too.

  Now, I serve up for Jono his sausages and his broccoli and his roast potatoes, and I sit myself down opposite him to watch him eat. And he says, ‘How come Dad gives you more money than he gives me?’

  I am taken aback. At first, I laugh. He is, after all, just a child. ‘He doesn’t give me money,’ I say. ‘It’s our money. We share.’

  ‘Dad earns it,’ he says. ‘So why do you get more than me?’

  ‘Jono, what you get is pocket money. And your father goes out to work, but I work just as hard here, at home, looking after you.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’ He cuts off a lump of sausage, and spears it. ‘You just do what all mums do.’

  Why does it hurt me so when my child speaks to me like this? Why do I feel that these comments of his are so accurately, sharply aimed right at the centre of my love for him? I look at him, methodically working his way through the food I so lovingly prepared, and I can’t stop my eyes from smarting. He knows that he hurts me; that’s why he does it.

  ‘Jono,’ I say, knowing that I shouldn’t even try to justify myself like this, ‘I used to go out to work. I had a job that I enjoyed very much. But I gave it up, because it would have meant leaving you with child-minders, and I didn’t want to have to do that. I wouldn’t have been here for you in the holidays, or after school. I wouldn’t even have been able to take you to school.’

  ‘I get the coach,’ he says, in a bored, indifferent voice.

  ‘Yes, but when you were at junior school.’

  He shrugs, and sticks a potato in his mouth. And I feel the heat rising in my face.

  ‘I thought it would be better for you to be brought up by your mother rather than by a succession of strangers,’ I say tightly. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  Again he shrugs. And he almost smirks. ‘Your choice,’ he says indifferently.

  Which are the same words that his father used, when I said that I couldn’t go back to work, when I sat sobbing on our bed and pleading, How can I go? How can I leave Jono in the care of strangers?

  Andrew sat beside me. He stroked my back, stiffly, mechanically, as if he’d read it in a book, an instruction manual: when the wife is sad and in need of comfort, she will need to be stroked. And he said, It’s your choice.

  But it didn’t feel like a choice. Quite the opposite, in fact. It felt like all my choices had been taken away.

  Jono finishes eating and lets his knife and fork clatter onto the plate. I cannot bear to look at him any more. ‘You know I did have a life of my own once,’ I say as I pick up his plate. A very good life.’

  And he says, ‘Well, what did you give it up for, then?’

  FIVE

  Jono will be thirteen in March. On June the seventh it will be ten years since my daughter was taken out of my womb. I do not know what has happened to the years. I do not know what has happened to me.

  I look at myself in the mirror and it is the same face, but a still version. As if a mask of me, a cardboard copy, has been stuck on over the gap underneath. Once, I was walking past the shops and a young man – a good few years younger than me – started walking alongside me and trying to chat me up.

  ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said. ‘But you’ve lost your sparkle. All you married women, you lose your sparkle. It’s criminal. I don’t know what your husbands are doing. Come out with me, love, and I’ll put the sparkle back in your eyes.’ And he persisted, trotting alongside me for the full length of the High Street while I did my best to ignore him. ‘Go on, love, what do you say? Come and have a drink with me and I’ll make you smile.’

  I told Andrew. I wanted to know what he would say. I wanted him to laugh, of course, but a little part of me also wanted him to grab hold of me and kiss me and set about putting the sparkle back for himself.

  But Andrew was not impressed. He tutted. He barely looked at me. And he said, ‘Oh, Rachel, don’t tell me you’d fall for that old line?’

  To which I replied, ‘No, of course not.’ But I couldn’t help wondering: had the sparkle gone from my eyes? And was it really that obvious?

  And this was three, maybe four, years ago. I turned forty the September before last. Who will ever care about the sparkle in my eyes now?

  On the wall in our spare room we have one of those wide glass photo frames that takes three photos, all in a row. We’ve had it for years. I bought it in a trendy little
shop near my office, not long after we were married, and I put in it my three favourite photos of us at the time. There’s one of us from our honeymoon, taken by a stranger outside St Mark’s in Venice; I am holding onto my sunhat, to stop it blowing away, and Andrew is holding onto me. And he’s looking at me like he can’t believe I’m there. The middle one is from another holiday; this time we are balanced on the edge of a sailing boat, our faces sun-kissed and smiling, our hair whipping in the wind. You can see we have nothing to worry about. You can see it’s just us, and whatever we want to be, wherever we want to go. The third photo is my favourite, though. In this, we are at Andrew’s firm’s Christmas party one year, long ago. We are sitting at a table among the debris of empty glasses and streamers, and we are flushed from laughing. I am wearing a black strapless dress and my hair, which was longer then, is curling loosely around my shoulders. We have our heads together for the photo and Andrew has his arm around me, squeezing me tight. We look so young, we look so in love, and see – I definitely hadn’t lost my sparkle then.

  These photos have been relegated to the spare room. In our old house they were on the landing, and before that, when we lived in our flat in Chiswick, they were in the hall. But gradually photos of Jono overtook their importance: photos of Jono as a baby, as a toddler, and of us with him, on holidays, in the garden, in the park. In these photos Andrew and I are merely the props, the supporting roles; we are smiling at him, we are holding him up, we are saying: look, here he is, our wonderful son.