“What’s wrong?” I asked. “They’re not as good as Leo’s, I admit. But I used his recipe.”
No answer. No one spoke at all, except the telephone. I began to count its howls while I went on eating. It helped me overcome my nausea. My ninth aubergine coincided with its twelfth bad-mannered scream. I pushed the plate away. Sickness in pregnancy can be very undermining — a bloated, distended feeling, loss of appetite, a retching sensation in the throat. I paused a moment, took a sip of wine.
“I believe you’re interested in modern physics,” I belched to the literary agent. It seemed only fair to take an interest in her, now that I’d nabbed her food. Unfortunately, I’d got it wrong. It was the photographer who had studied Heisenberg.
“More salt?” I stuttered. Safer, really, to stick to my hostess role. “No, don’t get up. I’ll get it.” I smiled across at the actress. I think we could have hit it off, us both being out of work. She’d have called it “resting”, though, and I had never felt less rested. All the aubergines I’d swallowed were squatting in my belly like fat black babies, kicking me in the ribs, taking me over, sharing my lungs, my heartbeat. Multiple pregnancy. A clutch of smooth, rounded little foetuses, spawning in my stomach, squeezing against all my vital organs. I longed to lie down, excuse myself, creep away to my divan. But we were only halfway through the meal. There was still the salad, the dessert. I couldn’t just surrender in the middle of a dinner party.
I dragged the salad into the centre of the table. I’d piled it into a huge china bowl, the sort the Victorians used for washing themselves, with a matching flower-sprigged ewer. The ewer held the vinaigrette. I slopped the dressing on to the lettuce leaves. My hands were very unsteady. Pregnancy unsettles all the nerves. The leaves turned wet and slimy, cucumber slices floated, waterlogged, tomatoes gaped and drowned. I felt too ill to pass it round. I used my hands as salad-servers, plunging them into the bowl up to the wrists and coating them with oil. It felt as if I were trying to grab a slippery, new-born baby. I crammed a fistful of lettuce in my mouth and forced it down.
“No, please don’t talk,” I said to the philatelist. “I don’t feel well.”
I knew I had to finish it. Salad is very expensive, out of season. It was too much effort to chew, so I just shoved in bits and pieces whole and swallowed them, choked on cucumbers, squashed my lips against tomato seeds. Salad oil was dribbling down my chin, trickling into the spaces between my buttons. I fumbled my hands up beneath my dress and unhooked my bra. My breasts almost whimpered with relief. I held them a moment, felt them warm, full, and throbbing through my hands. They were almost as large as Janet’s now, ready to suckle, bursting not with milk, but with vinaigrette. My whole body was swelling and distended. I had almost reached full term.
There was still a puddle of dressing in the bottom of the bowl. I could see the china flowers shining through it, as I tipped it up and emptied it down my throat. You always swallow oil before a baby. My mother had told me that. It acts as a lubricant, a laxative, eases the foetus out into a slippery world. I closed my eyes. The purple shawl was banging against my eyelids, the purple feathers swaying in my brain.
“Be quiet,” I begged. No one had said a word. My whole body was crammed and stuffed with food. I could feel it rising up to my neck, passing all the little notches like water in a measuring jug, slopping over through the waste-pipe of my lips. I went on chewing tiny morsels of bread. There were still little gaps and crannies to be filled, pin-holes in my wrists, chinks between my toes, small, forgotten spaces which would hold a quarter of a mouthful. Food was so muddled up with nausea, I could hardly tell them apart now. I pushed back my chair. We hadn’t had the damsons yet, but Leo always liked a pause between the courses.
“Excuse me a moment,” I murmured, as I struggled to my feet, lurched outside to the bathroom and voided everything I could. I dragged off the pantie-girdle and kicked it in a corner, rolled down my stockings, took off my pants. Pregnant women should never wear things tight. I still looked reasonable. The purple dress had soaked up all the oil stains, so that they hardly showed. My face was flushed, but that could have been the make-up. All my little buttons were still demurely fastened. I hadn’t disgraced myself. I was dry between the legs.
I returned to the dinner table.
“Dessert?” I asked. I could see my face distorted in the window and the dish of damsons wavering and shaking in the glass. The bowl was so heavy, I wanted to lie down with it on Mr Leatherstone’s rest-bed and have him swaddle and support me.
“It’s damson mousse,” I told them. I’d sprinkled nuts on top, so they couldn’t see it was curdled. The damsons came from Otto’s mother’s garden. Leo doesn’t have a garden or a mother any longer. Both his parents and Janet’s baby (and what was left of Lucian) must be somewhere in the same shadowy place.
I spooned the damson mixture into eight sundae dishes and lined them up in front of me. I wasn’t well enough to go moving round the table any more. I started with the actress’s. She was the only one whose name I even knew. The mousse tasted very cold and clean. It had been chilling in the fridge all afternoon. Almost a relief to feel it melt and shiver down my throat, flushing out the aubergines, cutting down the grease.
The second one was harder. There was simply no more room. The mousse was lying just on top of my throat, waiting to spring out at me. Slowly, I stood up and shook myself, like Karma. Some of the mousse subsided. I picked up my spoon and started on the third. I wished they’d make conversation. Distract me from the obscene and vulgar things happening in my gut. Leo often played the piano after dinner. We hadn’t finished yet, but I felt we needed music all the same. I unlocked the cupboard where I’d bunged the radio and tuned in to Radio Three. Like a miracle, they were playing one of Leo’s pieces, very fast and pouncy with lots of swirls and flurries. It didn’t help the damsons. I would have preferred something slow and merciful and soothing. But at least I felt a little safer with Leo there beside me, pounding and swaying on the keys.
I made a start on damsons number four. The sharp, tangy flavour of the fruit had somehow disappeared. All I could taste was onions now, and cream. Little piles of damson stones were beginning to hem me in.
“Tinker, tailor, soldier …” I began. It was impossible. Too many stones. I could see them piling up and up beside me, until I was buried in them, toppled by them. Damson stones reaching as high as the mulberry tree outside.
“Rich man, poor man …”
I fixed my gaze on the middle point in the wall between the windows. One of Leo’s oils was hanging there, and the exact midspot coincided with the right buttock of a blue male nude. I kept my eye on this and my ear on the prancing line of the piano. That way, I retained some vestige of control. Damsons number six slipped slowly, slowly down. The odd piece of damson skin had eluded the mixer and tangled with my tongue.
“Beggarman, thief.”
The nude male buttock was swinging gently up and down, up and … I paused for a moment to allow the kitchen to stop spinning, then took another spoonful. The mixture was warmer now and heavier. I held a stone like a boulder in my mouth, then slowly spat it out, along with a slimy shred of skin. I stirred the mixture round and round the dish. That way I lost some up the sides.
“It was a marvellous year for fruit,” I murmured. “Otto’s mother bottles them herself.”
I belched again. The piano drowned it tactfully, by starting on a crescendo.
“Doesn’t he play beautifully?” I remarked to the photographer. Mousse number eight had finally disappeared. I staggered out with the tray of empty dishes, the pile of ragged stones. It was difficult to walk. I wondered who was feeding Adrian. Janet wouldn’t have had time to leave him his Ryvita. Perhaps he was sitting by her bed, nibbling on her grapes. Grapes! I hadn’t even washed them. They were still oozing in their paper bag, fat and black, with a dusty purple bloom across them. I broke off a cluster and crammed them in my mouth. The pips crunched against my tongue like tiny half-for
med bones. Leo was struggling with a phrase on the piano, tearing it to pieces, turning it inside out.
I felt the whole second movement churning and heaving in my stomach, notes squashing against my gut, like grapes. “I’m sorry,” I spluttered. “You’ll have to excuse me. Leo will look after you.”
I dashed towards the bathroom, both hands cupped across my mouth. I slammed the door, and my whole fancy, curdled, purple dinner frothed and cascaded into the toilet bowl.
Chapter Seven
I was still lying on the cold white bathroom floor when Leo returned. I’d no idea what time it was. It was still purple outside the windows, purple in my stomach. One cheek felt cold against the tiles, the other burned and flushed. I could see Leo’s soft suede boots inching across the floor towards my nose. They stopped. If I’d put out my tongue, I could have touched them with it, but I felt too tired.
Leo scooped me off the tiles. I lay in his arms like a pile of dirty dishes. It was strange to feel him gentle. He laid me in his bed, underneath the dragons, and undid all my little buttons. He untied my hair and combed it with his fingers, washed my face with a sponge. I thought he wanted sex, and tried to move myself against him, but my body wasn’t there. Only a gigantic throbbing head and a gaping hole somewhere lower down.
He undressed me like a baby. I felt terribly ashamed. My body smelt of sweat and salad oil, and there was vomit on my dress. I wished he’d rage and shout. At least I’d feel secure, then.
“I was sick,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It was still difficult to speak. All the words were sticky with damson mousse. Leo held the sponge against my lips. I couldn’t bear his kindness. I didn’t know how to deal with it, what to say, how to move my limbs. I was like a virgin, unable to respond. I think I feared it would unravel him, lose him all his power.
“Look,” I said. “There’s no need to …”
“Hush,” he murmured, and laid his cool, sallow hands against my head. It was so beautiful, I could feel tears pricking against my eyelids. I wanted to break his hands off and kept them there, so that if he had to go away again, at least I would have part of him.
“Who was at your dinner?” I asked. I knew I had to talk to him, be worthy of him, stop him disappearing.
“Libby, Sian, Rowena …”
“Otto?”
“Yes, of course Otto.”
“Why ‘of course’?” It hurt to keep on talking. My body wanted simply to drift away.
“It was at his house, I told you.”
“Why didn’t you say Otto, then?” The tension made me irritable, the tenderness. I wasn’t used to tenderness.
“Oh, Thea, don’t go on … Look, I shouldn’t have left you. But I phoned at least a dozen times and when you didn’t answer, I presumed you must have gone out. I’d have come straight back if I’d realised you were ill.”
“I’m not ill.” I had slumped back down again. The whole of my body between my headache and my feet was water-logged and churning. Leo hated illness. He was never ill himself. If I didn’t sit up and talk to him, he might run back to Otto’s. Libby, Sian, Rowena were always radiant.
“Leo …”
“What?”
“Do you like Otto? I mean really like him?”
“Yes.” There was a tiny pause, as if he were waiting for a star to pass, a tree to fall.
“I don’t,” I said.
“I know you don’t.”
“Does he know?”
“Yes.”
“Does he mind?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind?”
“Yes, I do, Thea.”
I jabbed my foot against the coverlet. Four yes’s in a row. Sometimes I didn’t get a yes in seven days. But these were Otto’s yes’s. I wanted yes’s for myself, strings of them, years of them. I always had to share him. Otto was like Karma, fawning on Leo, beloved of him, closer to him than I was.
“Thea …” He was stroking my hair again. It felt miraculous and terrifying. “I wish you’d try and like him.”
“Why should I?” It came out curt, though I didn’t mean it to.
“Because it’s … important to me.”
I hated that word “important”, a hard, bony word when I was only a limp, crumpled sick-bag. I shut my eyes and tried to picture Otto — pale, flabby hands, fringe of soft hair falling in his wounded-mackerel eyes. All I could see was a white fish on a grey beach, gills gasping in and out, pale eyes staring, and a brown sea creeping up, up, up, on it.
“I don’t like his eyes,” I said.
The brown sea was swirling through my stomach, the grey fish flapping in my throat. I could feel the waves rolling over and over the bedspread.
Leo had a strand of my hair pressed against his lips. My whole scalp was singing with it. “D’you know what he said tonight?”
“Who?”
“Otto.”
Christ! Would we never be rid of Otto? Must he always be there between us, with those eyes?
“No,” I said. I didn’t want to know. I wanted Leo wholly to myself, coffined in the bedspread of my hair, saying only yes yes yes.
“He told me he thought he was suffering for the persecution of the Huguenots. He’s convinced that he was Louis de Gonzague in another life.”
“Who’s Louis de Gonzague?” I asked. This was worse than Adrian. I wasn’t well enough for history lessons. I was just an empty carton, kicked into a corner, leaking at both ends.
“Oh, a French nobleman who slaughtered thousands of the Protestants. His henchmen hacked them into pieces and flung the bodies in the Seine. He died in 1595, but Otto thinks he was Louis in a previous reincarnation.”
“I see,” I said. I felt like saying “fuck”. Only Otto would claim power on such a scale. Other people fretted about being insects in another life, or cats, or rats, or cockroaches. Only pale, scaly Otto spent his pasts as noblemen, masterminding massacres.
“I don’t think I want another life,” I said. Not if it was a life like this one, with divorce courts, and foetuses in bottles, and vomiting in bathrooms, and bodies in the Seine and only halves of people. An after-life was safer, a Roman Catholic one, where the soul was purged and the body purified, and one soared up, up, to where everything was free and white and shining, and God was legally and infinitely Father.
“You may not have much choice.” Leo had stopped stroking.
He still had my hair twisted through his hands, but he wasn’t concentrating. I could tell he was still haunted by the Huguenots. He and Otto had shut me out again, name-dropping in sixteenth-century France, believing in things I could neither prove nor leave alone. They’d been friends for years, long before I’d known them. Otto may have shared all his previous existences with Leo. Even as Louis de Gonzague, he’d probably sat with him over a pile of hacked and steaming corpses, arguing about the authority of the Bible versus the Pope.
“Why don’t you come to bed?” I asked. It made me uneasy the way he sat there, fully dressed. I didn’t feel like sex at all, but I wanted him to want me. I had never lain naked in his bed before without being straddled and deflowered. Usually, we never talked for long, before he rolled me over and rammed into me. But now it was the early hours and he was still just sitting there, holding my hand as if he were a nurse. The room was full of other people, other things — all the friends and fears and fancies he had churning in his head. I wanted to split it open and tip them out, until his head was clear and clean and empty, and I could burst inside it and reign there all alone.
“It’s late,” I whispered. “Come to bed.”
He didn’t answer. I felt tiny fingers of terror probe along my spine. He even had his boots on. It was as if it was all over and we had signed the divorce papers, divided the property, zipped up our jeans. Leo didn’t desire me. I bored him, disgusted him. He could probably smell the vomit in my hair.
“I’m sorry,” I said, struggling out of bed. “I’ll go and have a bath.”
“Hush, Thea, go to sleep.”
That was almost proof he didn’t want me. As soon as I was sleeping, he’d creep away again, return to his dinner party, clean Gonzague’s sword. I was sitting up now, my breasts only inches from his face, yet he hadn’t even glanced at them.
“I’m not tired,” I insisted. I took his hand and laid it on my chest, almost forced it there.
“No, Thea, it’s late. Too late. I want to go to sleep.”
Even Adrian didn’t say “too late”, or pull his hand away like that, or keep his boots on. I’d almost forgotten Adrian. I dragged the covers right up to my neck and lay back on the pillows.
“I had some people round tonight,” I said.
Leo only grunted.
“For dinner.” I could see the aubergines curdled with the damsons. I never wanted to think of food again. If I came back in another life, I would return as something which didn’t have a stomach — a cloud, a stone, a flower.
“I invited Adrian.”
No answer. Only the sound of Karma’s heavy breathing. He was curled in a corner like a nerveless cat, paws across his nose, snuffling in his sleep.
“He said he couldn’t manage it at first, but he turned up later, when everyone else had gone.”
Silence.
“You didn’t know that, did you, Leo?”
“Go to sleep.”
At least I had made him nervous. He was flicking the fringe of the bed-cover through his fingers, one foot jab-jabbing the floor.
After Purple Page 8