And she turns on me.
‘Who are you?’ she demands. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice is shrill and angry and she unlocks her hands from her lap and starts clutching around on the sofa beside her, as if searching for something to grab.
‘Mrs Reiber, I told you; I’m Rachel.’
‘I know what you told me, but who are you really? Coming here with all these questions!’ She snatches up a leaflet, advertising takeaway pizzas of all things, that was lying on the end of her sofa, and starts scrunching it and ripping it between her fingers.
‘Mrs Reiber, I’m a friend of Vanessa’s. Please, won’t you just tell me: are you Vanessa’s mother?’
‘What do you want?’ she shrieks. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘I don’t want anything. Really, please . . . I’m sorry, I don’t want to upset you—’
‘Did Simon send you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Mrs Reiber, please, if you are Vanessa’s mother—’
‘I do not have a daughter!’ She stands up, and the shredded remains of that leaflet flutter to the ground from her lap like confetti.
‘Mrs Reiber, please—’
‘I do not have a daughter!’ she cries. ‘Now, please, just go!’
I’ve no choice but to stand up too. She is pointing towards the door and her hand is shaking. Her eyes are bright with anger and fear and her face is white, totally drained of all colour.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘So sorry.’ And I keep saying it as I walk through the kitchen and the hall. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
She follows me halfway down the hall, no further. She’s still pointing with that finger, her arm outstretched, saying, ‘Go. Just go.’ When I reach the front door I look back and I see her there, this sad and broken woman, and my heart is wrenched. ‘I loved Vanessa,’ I say before I open the door, and my voice cracks over the words. It’s true; I did love her. I loved her so simply, on a burst of pure feeling. Joy, without demands, without need. She was like a star, Vanessa; a star shining brightness into the humdrum greyness of my otherwise so ordinary life.
And now her mother stands there like an animal cornered. She stabs at the air in front of her with her finger. ‘Go,’ she shouts and her voice is hoarse and cracked. ‘Just leave me alone.’
I almost stagger away from that house. My heart is racing and I breathe fast, with the cold air ripping down my hot, tight throat. I feel that everyone in the street will have heard her shouting at me, and will now be looking out of their windows to see what’s going on, to see who it is that has upset that old woman so. And so I scuttle away with my head down, not looking at those houses, not looking anywhere except at the pavement in front of me. The street is quiet, but inside my head I can hear her voice still, echoing over and over: Go, go, just leave me alone.
I am so ashamed and so humiliated, and I fold my arms across my body and pinch and twist at the skin of my forearms through the sleeves of my coat. She made me feel like some kind of pariah, practically throwing me out like that. The shame of it turns and knots inside me. How could she treat me like that? Why would she treat me like that? Am I so unsavoury to her that it is inconceivable that her daughter would have me for a friend? And why would she think Simon had sent me? That is, of course, if her son is Simon.
But of course he is.
Am I mad? Am I making this whole thing up? A horrible coldness cramps across my shoulders and I huddle into my coat. What if I am all wrong? What if she is just a lonely old woman and nothing to do with Vanessa, and here I am turning up with my accusations and my prying? Then she would react like that. She would want me out of her house.
Doubt drags inside my stomach.
What if I have just fabricated the whole thing? What if I heard that woman’s name, and latched on, and now I’m just looking for proof, when really there is none? There are coincidences, that’s all, and not many of them. And you can read what you want into coincidences. You can believe what you want to believe. Suddenly I see a horrible image of myself, distorted and cloudy, as if I’m looking through the bottom of a glass. I see myself on that hospital bed as first that midwife, then a doctor and then Andrew himself tried to tell me my baby had no heartbeat. One by one they said it, and then one by one they all said it again, as if they thought I had trouble hearing. But they were wrong. Only that morning I’d felt my baby moving. And I could feel it again right then.
‘Look, see, she moved!’ I cried. I prodded my stomach with the palm of my hand. My stomach moved; I could see that it moved. I prodded it again.
‘Rachel . . .’ Andrew said, and his voice was thick and clogged with anguish. I looked at him, but he looked away and his lower lip was wobbling like crazy.
‘Look!’ I screamed at him. ‘Look, she’s moving!’
The midwife said, ‘Hush, now, hush,’ or some other such nonsense, and tried to cover me with a blanket, but I pushed her away, and the doctor made his excuses and left the room.
‘I’ll give you a few minutes,’ he said on his way out, but what kind of a cop-out was that?
‘She’s moving!’ I screamed, but no one would hear me. I shoved at the mound of my stomach, I pushed at it and pummelled it with my hands. ‘How can she be dead if she’s moving?’
And I see myself crying and wailing like a mad thing, with the snot and the tears all mingling with the dribble running out of my mouth. I see myself unrecognizable, out of control, alternately clutching and slapping at my stomach, and Andrew standing there in the corner with his hand across his eyes, quietly crying.
What is the truth if you cannot see it? What is the truth anyway if you just turn away?
They didn’t take her out straight away. I had to be booked in. Andrew and I had to leave that small room, and walk to the in-patients desk with the midwife and book me a bed. I had to stop screaming and pull myself together and walk through the waiting area filled with other pregnant women, all looking at me with their horrified eyes.
And the woman at the desk asked me if tomorrow would be convenient. I was lucky, she said, they’d got a cancellation.
‘Lucky?’ I shrieked at her. ‘How am I lucky? And what do you mean you’ve had a cancellation? Is some other woman’s baby not dead after all?’
‘Ssh, Rachel, please . . .’ Andrew said and put his hand on my forearm. The midwife, standing the other side of me, did the same, so there I was, pinned between them with both of them holding onto my arms, ready to trap me, ready to hold me down.
We had to go home, and pack a bag. Andrew had to collect Jono from my parents’ house, and make arrangements for him to come back again, the next day. I couldn’t bear to see them. I waited in the car. And then there was Jono, oblivious, demanding his place in life as usual. He wanted feeding, he wanted attention, he wanted to play. He wanted things. I moved about our house with our dead baby inside me. I sat on the toilet, and tried to push her out. But she clung on. She clung on all night, and why would she do that if she was dead?
‘Rachel, the doctor said she could have been dead for days,’ Andrew said later in the middle of a long, sleepless night, doing his best to reason, doing his best to accept what we’d been told. But I couldn’t accept.
‘I think I’d know if my baby was dead, don’t you?’ I cried. ‘I think I’d be the one to know. Why would she be dead?’
Andrew sighed and quoted banalities into the void. ‘These things just happen sometimes,’ he said in his weary, robot’s voice. ‘It’s nobody’s fault.’
And the next day he drove me back to that hospital, and parked the car in the in-patients area, and carried my bag packed with my nightie and my towel and the oversized sanitary pads that I would still, apparently, be needing, and steered me zombie-like to the maternity ward. And there I was shown my bed, at the end of a ward in which there were other women, in various stages of labour. I saw some of them look at me, as if there was a sign over my head saying, This woman’s baby is dead. The midwife pulled the curtain around my bed,
to underline my isolation, and gave me a drug, to get things going. I was too numb to cry, too numb to do anything other than what I was told: to undress, to take the pill and keep on breathing.
The midwife patted my arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’ll all be over in an hour or two.’
But my poor baby didn’t want to come out. She clung on, with every wave of searing pain. Andrew walked me along the corridor and we stopped at the window and stared out a day that was shrouded in a ghostly, threading mist. Up and down the corridor we walked, up and down, in a horrible, endless limbo, until somebody decided it was time for us to go. Panic gripped me then, digging its nails into my chest, and I clung to Andrew.
‘I can’t do it,’ I cried. ‘I can’t.’
And he said back, ‘You have to.’
The delivery suite was eerily quiet, a shell of cold steel, rigged up for battle. No beeping monitors like I’d needed for Jono, no chat from the midwife, no bustling in and out. When Jono was born there was a radio playing, I remember: Capital, with its non-stop pop and banter. But into this silence we came now, interrupting its sterility with our broken voices and our helplessness; the midwife with her hushed instructions, Andrew with his stilted attempts at encouragement, parroting whatever the midwife said – and I wished he’d shut up, my God I wished he’d shut up – and me, howling out my pain on a pethidine-laced haze.
And soon, too soon, the silence.
I did not see my baby. I felt her wrenching her way out of my body, and then the smallness of her, slippery against my thighs.
I couldn’t look. I heard Andrew gasp and choke on a sob, and the midwife saying, ‘She’s beautiful. A beautiful little girl. Would you like to hold her?’
I lay there with my eyes squeezed shut.
‘Rachel? Rachel?’ Andrew said, and his voice was thin and weak as a punctured tyre. I heard the quiver of his breath. If I looked at him I’d see him crying, I’d see him crying with our dead baby in his arms.
How much time passed? I did not open my eyes. At some point, they took her away. And then they wheeled me back down to the ward and pulled those curtains around me again, and Andrew went home and left me there. All night I heard the whispers and the moans and the snores of other women, and all night the silence of myself. My body throbbed, stripped out with rawness, bleeding. My breasts tingled and fizzed like a pair of showgirls, waiting for their cue to perform.
‘You get some rest,’ the midwife said. ‘It’s all over now.’
When Andrew turned up the next morning to take me home he brought Jono with him, to cheer me up, he said. And so I had to smile, and be normal. I had to be Mummy, Jono’s mummy. And so it would seem that the midwife was right: it was all over now.
‘How are you feeling?’ Andrew asked.
And dutifully I replied, ‘Fine.’
What more could be said, with Jono there to distract us, to keep us on track? We put our parent hats on, Andrew and I, and we kept them on for evermore.
I do not know what my baby daughter looked like, but I see her every day. I see her as I imagine she’d be now, at nine years old with a gap-toothed smile and her soft brown hair tied back in a pink and white band, wisps of it escaping and fluttering on the breeze. I hear her voice as she chatters away, saying, Mummy, Mummy; I hear her laughing and I hear her cry.
Every day I hear her cry.
How can I ever know what is true and what isn’t? Life drifts along, one lie upon another, whatever I choose to make of it, whatever I convince myself that it should be.
Sometimes, in the darkest of nights, I dream that something has happened to Jono. I dream this in an abstract kind of way; I am never with him at the time. But I get the phone call, or the knock at the door. But then, instead of answering that phone or opening that door, I see myself outside suddenly walking instead, walking for mile upon mile along a green windswept cliff top. And I know that if I can just keep on walking, I will never hear the bad news. If I just keep walking, Jono will be safe. Because how can anything have happened to Jono if I cannot be told?
What is the truth if you never let yourself hear it? What is the truth if you just keep on walking away?
And who is lying now? Is it Mrs Reiber, telling me she isn’t Vanessa’s mother when my instincts are screaming to me that she is?
Or is it me? Am I lying to myself? Am I seeing what I want to see?
All these thoughts and all these questions; they plait themselves around me. They tangle with my doubts, and with my sense of myself as a copy of a person, a series of arms and legs and body parts stapled together to make up the image of a whole.
SEVEN
The next day, at three o’clock, Andrew and I take our places in the huge and ridiculously crowded church of St Mark’s in Hensham for Jono’s school Christmas concert. It is the lower school only today; the upper school will be doing the same thing again tomorrow, but even so the church is absolutely packed. We are greeted on the way in by the PTA elite, handing out programmes and ushering us down the aisles in search of somewhere to sit or stand.
‘Good grief,’ says Andrew, as if he’s forgotten what it was like last year. ‘Did you know it would be this busy?’
‘That’s why I said we should get here early,’ I say a little sharply. ‘To get a seat.’ I force a smile onto my face. I do not want people to see us arguing.
We end up having to stand at the back of the far-left aisle, with our view pretty much obscured by a pillar. I can’t even see Jono, though he is up there somewhere, crammed onto the stage, one of however many boys in identikit blazers and ties.
I am tired from standing even before the headmaster has finished his speech, but it would not do to slouch, so I do my best to stand tall and look interested and proud, even though I can barely see a thing past that pillar. I hear how well the boys are doing, and how privileged they are to be at Hensham Boys’, but that such privilege carries with it its own duties, to which they all must aspire. It’s quite a good speech, pitched perfectly at the wallets of the fathers. This year’s charity, apparently, is the new music block, although – from what I remember – the existing music block, next to the dining hall, is not exactly old. It certainly looked pretty impressive to me when I saw it on the open day, with all its sound equipment and every instrument you could think of, ready and waiting to be played. At my school you carted your own recorder or flute or guitar, or whatever, in on a Wednesday and played it in one of the maths’ classrooms at lunchtime, if you felt so inclined. But still, we must always strive to do more, as the headmaster says, and around me I see heads nodding in agreement. I look at Andrew, and even he is nodding and looking beyond that pillar in a wistful, misty-eyed way. He went to a grammar school in the Midlands somewhere, before they were abolished. A boys’ grammar school. Maybe this all takes him back, down a rose-coloured memory lane. It certainly takes Jono forward, away from us.
But who am I to complain? This is what I bought into. This is what I wanted for my precious, only son.
The boys start to sing, accompanied by the junior orchestra, and many of the parents join in. We have the words in our programmes. Rousing numbers, all of them: ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ and the like, and, of course, good old ‘Jerusalem’, though I’ve never heard that one at a Christmas concert before. A small blonde boy gives an angelic rendition of ‘Away in a Manger’ and I swear there isn’t a dry eye in the church. I look around, I see all these people, these lucky, chosen people puffed up with pride for their lucky, chosen sons, and even though I am in theory one of them – after all, I am here, and my son, too, is here – I feel like an alien, I feel like an impostor, a fake. So many blonde heads, so many expensive wool and silk jackets and beautiful scarves, so many men with the permanently tanned necks of those who ski and sun, and ski again; the glint of jewellery, the flash of a BlackBerry discreetly tended. I look around, I stand among these people. I am here, I am here, and yet I am not.
I look at Andrew agai
n. He is tilted slightly backwards on his heels, totally enthralled. He is oblivious to me, and to the turmoil inside my head. He worked at home this morning, so that he would be ready for this. He shut himself in the study and I moved about the house with my demons raging inside me. If he loved me, he would see how tense I am. If there was any connection at all, surely, he would feel it. But he shuts himself away. He cuts himself off. I am best avoided, or handled at a distance, as though with gloves.
I look down suddenly. And I see with a jolt of embarrassment that slaps its cringing arms across my shoulders that Andrew is wearing the wrong shoes. He is wearing the soft-soled comfy slip-ons that he bought for weekends. They stick out from the bottom of his trousers like a pair of old man’s easy-fit. It took me an age to decide what to wear; I even washed my hair again, and redid my make-up, and now I am standing here, crippling my feet in a pair of suede high heels, but there is Andrew, dressed for comfort and quite blatantly so. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even realize. Shame grabs me by the shoulders and hangs me strapped like a puppet. I nudge him and he looks at me.
‘You’re wearing the wrong shoes!’ I hiss in a whisper.
And he just looks at me, incredulously.
‘Your shoes!’ I whisper. ‘Why didn’t you put your smart shoes on?’
Andrew glances down at his feet and then back at me. Irritation cobwebs his forehead and he mouths at me to shush. And then he turns away from me and back to the stage, angling himself so that his shoulders are distinctly there between us. My heart is thumping. I am doubly embarrassed; first by Andrew’s shoes, and now by this show of hostility. I imagine everyone is watching us, and noticing. This is not how I wanted us to be. What I wanted was for us to be united and serene, as benevolently happy as all these other perfect parents around us. I wanted us to fit in.
I suffer through the rest of the concert. I am ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I know I am wrong even to care about something as trivial as shoes, and the truth is that I wish I was more like Andrew and that I didn’t care. But I can’t help thinking that the other women – women like Amy and Stephanie – will be looking at us and later, talking about us and rolling their eyes. Did you see her husband? they might say. Did you see his shoes? And did you see the way he told her to be quiet? They, of course, will have perfectly turned-out husbands, as polished as themselves. Men who wear custom-made clothes during the week and Paul Smith at the weekend. Men who wear their shoes as if they own the world, and not as if they were just heading off to the garden centre.
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