“Haven’t you got a nightdress?”
I didn’t bother answering. She’d seen me arrive with nothing more than my sheepskin and a shoulder-bag, so, “Haven’t you got a nightdress?” meant “Slut, whore — that Camembert was meant to last all week and why can’t you choose a boyfriend who’s respectable?”
She returned with the sort of garment they sell in mail-order catalogues for the overweight and house-bound. It had long sleeves and a high neck and was made in some school-knicker fabric in a shade they probably described as “Dawn” or “Oyster”, but was more like puke. It even smelt of Janet, though, mercifully, I couldn’t see a ‘J’ on it.
“Night,” I said, crawling in between the slimy nylon sheets which lapped damply at my legs.
“The bathroom’s next door,” she primmed. That was Janetesque for “Decent people wash themselves before they get into bed.” But if she thought I was going to drag myself out again and waste their precious, budgeted, cheap-rate, cut-price water, then she was seriously mistaken. I’d been travelling for an entire day and a night, sitting on a step another day, and now my whole life and God and home had been blown to pieces, and all Janet could suggest was soap and flannel. They weren’t even necessary. The way she sterilised everything, I’d probably be fumigated just by lying on her bed linen. I could feel the germs simply giving up, dropping off me in groaning little clusters as they whiffed the Ibcol on the sheets.
I couldn’t sleep. I tried to count germs instead of sheep, but I kept limping after Leo, stopping in squalid cafés on roaring foreign motorways, watching Otto’s soft fairish hair drip on to Leo’s shoulder. They were sharing everything — coffee, curry, beds, bodies, mouths. I had driven Leo away by landing myself in hospital with a bill he couldn’t pay, by being poor and dim and ill and unemployable, by messing up my looks. He had turned to a man whose soul was a piece of Sung — a flawless specimen neither cracked, nor chipped nor riveted. A man with a proper mouth whose lips were always open, and a proper four-square father who had grown up with him and played with him and had only finally died so that Otto could inherit all his Ming. A man he could get it up for, a man he didn’t despise, a man he had to deceive me over because he had invested all his wealth and passion in him. There had been a hundred thousand clues and I had turned my back on all of them. The time they spent together, the way they sat so close, the Ganymede Club, the bum-boys in dark glasses, the sleazy bars they haunted, the naked greed in Otto’s boiled-fish eyes.
Leo had never said “I love you” because he was saving it for Otto, saying it to Otto whispering it in bars, in bed, in ecstasy. I could hear him now, that caressing dark-brown voice rubbing against Otto like the bristles of a beard. They were both tangled up in bed with me, cramping me, ignoring me, taking up all the room. I punched and kicked them out again. Better to be alone than be betrayed.
I lay in the darkness listening to the purr and leer of their departing car. It was cold and clammy in the nylon sheets. I had taken off the nightie because I didn’t like the feeling of being wrapped from neck to toe in Janet. There was only one blanket, a thin, grudging sort of dishcloth thing she had probably bought because it said “non-iron, non-crease, no-fuss”, not to mention non-warm, no-use. I crept out of bed and opened the bottom drawer of the dressing-table. I hoped I’d find one of Adrian’s sweaters which would come down to my thighs and smell of Mars bars and medieval kings and pencil sharpenings.
There weren’t any sweaters, only a stack of baby clothes wrapped in tissue paper. I stared at the matinée jackets with their miniscule pearl buttons, the tiny Viyella nighties and midget woollen vests. There were three dozen towelling nappies, a white fluffy shawl, a muslin christening gown; two little bibs with bears on, even a bobbing bunny for hanging in a pram. Everything was white — white and dead like Janet’s baby was. Opening that drawer was like ripping off a Band-Aid. I’d thought I was grazed before, but now my wounds all shrieked and poured with blood. Lucian, Lourdes, Ray, God; my cold, hopeless suitcase still shivering on the doorstep, Mike gasping and dying in a foreign hospital, Ray in mortal sin. And roaring, revving, honking through them all, Leo and Otto blazing into Kashmir with the sun shining on their wild and spoken love.
I picked up a tiny dress with smocking on the front and pink ribbon threaded through the sleeves. Janet had wanted a girl-child. She’d had a boy and I’d murdered him. These were the corpse’s clothes. Increase and multiply, the priest had said and all I had done was kill. Leo was in Otto’s bum in Kashmir, and Karma was in kennels, and Janet’s baby was rotting in a hole. I didn’t cry. It would only disturb Adrian as he nuzzled into Janet in the master bedroom.
I carried the baby clothes very gently in my arms as if they were still living. I laid them on the bed, spreading them underneath me like a nest. I kept the shawl to one side while I snuggled in and arranged my limbs against the towelling nappies and the little piles of vests. It was warmer now, and softer. I tucked the shawl across me and pressed the bobbing bunny between my breasts. I closed my eyes. The road to Kashmir dwindled, softened, slumped, until it was only a length of soft white baby ribbon curling through a sleeve.
I slept.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Adrian woke me in the morning with a cup of tea. I refused to open my eyes. Babies sleep nineteen hours out of twenty-four. All I wanted was to be a baby — to lie on my back and kick my legs and crow, and shut out all the grown-up things like loss and sex and pain and God and Kashmir, which had come choking and screaming into the room when Adrian drew the curtains.
I took a sip of tea. He had forgotten I take sugar. I had been married to Adrian for six and a quarter years, with three cups of tea on average, every day, two spoonfuls per cup. I tried to multiply six and a quarter by three hundred and sixty-five, by three, by two. I’m no good at arithmetic but I knew it must be near a ton or so of sugar. And now, not even a saccharin. It was as if he had slapped me in the face. I could feel slow stupid tears sliding down my cheeks. I pushed the cup away — it was cold, in any case.
“Thea … darling …” He came and sat beside me on the bed. He was wearing a fuzzyish blue sweater which made him look cuddly like a child’s toy. But above the neck, he was man. There were newly minted frown-lines running down his forehead, and on his chin a tiny glower of blood where he had cut himself shaving. He smelt of the sort of strong, cheap soap they use in public washrooms.
He laid his hand, palm upwards, on the bedspread, as if it were an offering to me, like a piece of toast or the morning newspaper. I was naked underneath the covers. The baby clothes had worked themselves down to the bottom of the bed and were now all creased and tangled with the sheets, the bobbing bunny just a hard lump in my side. I struggled up and took his hand. My breasts looked pale and puny against its broad, freckled tan. He dragged his sweater off and slipped it over my head. I felt his hands brushing down my chest, clumsy and tender both at once, as if he were trying to dress a baby. He left his arm around me. I could hear a bird singing one astonished note over and over in the laburnum tree outside. The sun was throwing gold-dust at the clouds. How could birds sing and suns shine when Leo was in Kashmir and in love with Otto, and Adrian didn’t belong to me?
“Adrian,” I said.
“Mmmm … ?”
“May I stay here? Just a week or two? Please. Just till Leo gets back.”
“He’s … er … not coming back, Thea. I think you ought to know that.”
“Yes,” I said. Then “No”. There didn’t seem much difference between the two. I could see Leo growing old in Kashmir, hair white against his sallow skin, blue veins raised on frail, shrivelled hands. Otto wasn’t older. Otto was still young, pale, flabby, narrow, sly — hair fine as a child’s, eyes like runny eggs. Louis de Gonzague.
“I know it’s hard, darling, but it’ll be better in the end, honestly it will. Leo was never right for you. You can start again now. Find a nice little bedsit somewhere and a new job. I’ll help you, Thea — you know I will.”
“Thanks,” I said. A cold wind from the Himalayas was cutting through my head.
“Let’s have breakfast, shall we? — and try and make some plans. Janet’s gone to work already, but she said goodbye and hoped you were feeling better.”
Goodbye. That’s what Janet would say. Maybe she’d even left the details of a few bedsitters on the breakfast table. No — nothing there except the damask napkins, and some dusty looking starch-reduced wheatflakes and a slice or two of slimmer’s bread which was so white and light it was like eating Aertex knickers. The wheatflakes weren’t even in a carton, just measured out into two small bowls, so we couldn’t pig ourselves. I glanced around the kitchen. Nothing was in its packet, as if manufacturers’ wrappings were too bright and tawdry to be allowed to expose themselves. Everything had been decanted into matching tins and jars. No vulgar competitions, no shrieking advertisements. The six multi-coloured cereals no longer sat and juddered on the fridge. There wasn’t even the judder. It was a new fridge which didn’t need defrosting. Janet always bought things for what they didn’t need. Perhaps she saw Adrian like that — her non-iron, non-feed, non-screw husband.
I tried to force the food down, but Leo and Otto’s breakfast kept getting in the way. Hot, steamy, foreign things they were gulping down in bed, Otto dripping coffee on to Leo’s naked chest, feeding him little morsels of goat’s-milk cheese or bean curd, fingers touching lips.
“If I stayed here,” I said, spreading my bread with some low-calorie margarine which smelt like paraffin, “I could help Janet in the house. I mean, if she’s working in the City, she can’t have much time to …”
Adrian put his knife down. “She … er … won’t be working much longer, Thea.”
“Oh?”
We both stopped chewing and there was a silence in which all the dumb, silent, stupid things like sinks and cupboards and draining boards started to writhe and shriek and wring their hands and I knew they were only waiting for Adrian to take a hammer to them and batter them to pieces.
He had torn his slice of bread into ragged little shreds, as if it were an unwelcome item on a newspaper. “You see, Thea …” He put his knife down, picked it up again, jabbed it through the tablecloth. “What I wanted to say was …” There was a little rent in the non-iron terylene, which showed through the dark wood of the table like a tiny smear of blood. “We — I mean, Janet. She’s …” He stopped.
“Pregnant,” I breathed.
“You knew, Thea?” He crammed all the bread bits into his mouth, almost in relief, and mumbled through them. “You can’t have done. She promised not to tell you and I …”
“No,” I whispered. “I didn’t know.”
I waited a moment while the kitchen stopped spinning and howling and tearing out its eyes. Stupid to be so hysterical. Pregnant was only a word — eight letters, nine months. Adrian wasn’t her non-screw husband, that was all. He had screwed her through the stitches, maybe even at the hospital on the National Health. She had hardly recovered from the D and C, the patching up, before he had flung her on her back and ripped her apart again. The baby clothes I had creased and spoilt were for a living child. Janet was no longer a nine-to-five receptionist, but a full-time womb. That was her job, now. She would be at home with Adrian every minute of every single day, swelling and sanctifying a little more each month, rationing her husband while she and her baby grew to fill the house. There wouldn’t be room for me. They’d need all the space for white muslin dresses and bobbing bunnies and cans of no-fuss baby food sitting on the non-judder, non-care fridge.
I tried to push the ceiling away. It seemed to have fallen in on me and was pressing on my forehead, so that everything was jumbled up together. Leo pregnant, Otto lying in his arms in a tiny muslin dress, both of them in bed making babies together, Adrian in the delivery room being stitched and sterilised.
“I’ll just have a bath,” I said.
“Look, Thea, I didn’t want you to know, honestly I didn’t, but Janet thought … You’re not too upset, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
I knelt on the lino in the cold, cramped black-and-white tiled bathroom, which had little droplets oozing down the walls and three different types of bath-cleaner, each with a J-cloth folded neatly on the top.
“Bernadette,” I prayed. I knew she was listening. After all, she’d planned this entire thing — the loss of Leo, the long wait on the doorstep, Janet’s pregnancy, the dead and living baby clothes. She was forcing me to see I didn’t need homes or husbands or pregnancies. I was special, chosen, branded, however I might fear it. I had tried to run away from her, refuse to be a seer, turn instead to all the trifling tinsel baubles like love and babies and luncheon vouchers, double-barrelled offices, chocolate-coated toys. One by one, she had wrested them away from me, cut off all my bolt-holes. She had found me a job far more dazzling and exclusive than anything the Burton Bureau could offer, lifted me above the squalid pettiness of screwing and spawning, and saved me for her own high calling, to be hallowed, hallmarked, blest.
I knew now what I must do — follow her example and go back to St Maur’s, to those simple dove-white nuns who had turned their back on earthly ties and dross. Bernadette herself had entered a convent, given up her friends, her home, her relatives. It hadn’t been easy for her. She had sobbed all through that first bitter night away from home, pined for her Grotto, her father, the safe familiar life with her brothers and sisters in their cramped and cosy kitchen. She could have married and produced a string of kids. But God had made her fruitful in another way, filled her womb with visions instead of babies. Even if they were false visions, she was still famous, still allowed to flit about the world. I had tried to evade her, stamp her out, trample on her, call her just a nightmare, or an illusion, pretend she never happened. But I knew I had seen her more truly than I knew anything in my life. She was forcing me to accept it. She would pursue me and punish me, pounce on all my comforts and securities until I fell on my knees and cried “thy will be done”.
I was on my knees now, the squiggled lino pressing into them, the steam from the bath I didn’t want but which Adrian had run for me, coiling up to the polystyrene ceiling, like incense or a prayer.
“I’m coming,” I whispered to her. It didn’t matter now that Leo was in Kashmir or Janet six weeks gone. I had my mission too, my goal, my labour. I would suffer birth-pangs for the Truth. I had no more need to demean myself, to trail around employment agencies and put up cards for shabby basement rooms or answer ads for “Fourth girl wanted, to sleep in dining-room”. I would return to the convent and soar beyond the world, live in a white nest at the top of a tree, with winged white nuns fluttering all around me. I pulled out the plug and let the shining, untouched water glug away. I didn’t need to wash — I was clean now, uncorrupted.
I walked downstairs, coat buttoned, hair combed. I had even made my bed — returned all the baby clothes to their sworls of tissue paper. They hardly mattered now.
Adrian was tinkering with the waste-disposal unit. His back was bowed and leaden, as if he had grown older in an hour.
“I’m going to the hospital,” I told him.
“What?” He swung round. There were splashes on his shirt and one button had pulled undone. Despite the rationing, he was still too broad. “No, Thea. Look, if you’re worried about that bill, I …”
“I’m not,” I said. They wouldn’t charge me. They had accepted Bernadette without a dowry. I would pay in Truth, if not in fees. It would be an honour for them to shelter me. Several different convents had fought for the privilege of housing Bernadette.
“I’ve got to see Sister Ursula,” I explained. “I’ve something to tell her — something vitally important.”
He tugged a piece of carrot out of the sink and stared at it as if it were a new type of vegetable he’d never seen before. “She’s … er … not there, Thea.”
I smiled. Janet had instructed him to say that. They were both shit-sca
red I was going to cost them more. They were so materialistic, so worldly, they couldn’t see beyond bills and fees, scrimping and screwing, making babies on the National Health, eking out the Camembert all week.
“It’s OK,” I said. “They won’t charge me. All I want is a fiver for the taxi, and after that I won’t bother you for a cent.”
“I’ll help you as far as I can, Thea — you know that — but you’re not to go to St Maur’s.”
I wondered now how I could ever have admired him. He was so limited, so narrow, floundering around among his ha’pennies and his cash-books, not realising that souls and truth come free.
“D’you know the number of a taxi firm?” I shrugged. I was already thumbing through Janet’s ready-reference book which was full of plumbers and discount houses and hairdressers called Maison Victor.
“Thea, listen, they’re pulling down the hospital. It’s going to be demolished. I didn’t want to tell you, but …”
Amazing the lies Janet woud resort to. She’d pull whole buildings down, just to pay me back. She’d probably spent the night polishing up her stories, then passing them on to Adrian after they’d finished screwing, instructing him to confuse and con and frighten me.
“Look,” I said. “I’m getting out of here.” Next thing I knew, she’d be telling Adrian to inform me they’d demolished Kashmir.
“Thea, please, you can stay — just for a day or two. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Janet’s only a bit on edge because she’s nervous about the baby and feeling sick all the time and …”
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