The Godmother

by Carrie Adams

  “That’s the thing, Ben, it wasn’t about Al and Claudia. Not for me.”

  “What?”

  “It was about us.”

  I put my hand to my chest to reassure it. I asked it not to panic. I asked it to continue calmly rising and falling, so that I could get the words out. “I adore you, Ben. OK?” I shrugged. The single biggest confession of my life was no confession at all. “I always have.”

  “Me too.”

  “I know. But I adore you too much.”

  Ben stopped walking again and looked at me strangely. “What are you saying?”

  What was I saying? I was trying to say those three little words, but I couldn’t. “I’m saying that I value your friendship above all others, but the thing is, you’re married, which is great. For you. But it doesn’t work so well for me. I compare everyone to you and no one comes close. How could they? Our foundations are so deep and I don’t have to wash the skid marks out of your boxers.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind, I know what I mean. The thing is,” I said, forging ahead, “I have to move on to a new plot, find someone to make some new foundations with. Or maybe not, maybe I won’t find anyone. But I can’t go on like this. I mustn’t.” I kicked at some freshly fallen leaves. There. I’d said it.

  Ben took my hand. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “If you think I’m saying that I want to move house, no.” Big, deep breath. “But if you think I’m saying that I have imagined a life with you in another role, then yes.”

  “But not a priest or an electrician, or a bus driv—”

  “No. None of those.” It was all right to make light of this, but only if it was me, and only if it wasn’t too light.

  There was a lengthy pause after that.

  “I didn’t know.”

  I found that hard to believe, but men are wired up differently, so anything was possible. “For a long time I didn’t know myself. Or I pretended not to, I can’t really remember. It’s all been going on for such a long time, through most of which I’ve been having fun.”

  “A lot of fun,” reiterated Ben. “You’ve never been anything but fun.”

  “Have no fear, I shall be again.” I managed a smile. “But somewhere along the line I got tired of doing it all by myself. I got tired of being strong; of paying all the bills; of having to make all my own plans; of working; of living in London; of going on dates that came to nothing. I got tired of it all. I guess you became an easy option.” I looked at him. My breath left me. Damn those eyes. I had to see this through to the end. “Which was madness. Because you are not the easy option.”

  “Is that why you took those pills?” asked Ben.

  “How the hell do you know about that?”

  “I have my sources.”

  I frowned.

  Ben shrugged. “You put the phone down on me then disappeared off the face of the earth. I didn’t know what was going on. Eventually I went round to your flat. You weren’t there, but Roman told me what had happened.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that.”

  “He was worried too.”

  “I had no idea how strong they were.”

  “Maybe. But I would be worried if you took junior aspirin if it was with vodka.”

  “A foolish oversight.”

  “Do you promise me?”

  “I promise.”

  “It’s just that everyone I know who’s got into trouble with pills, took them with vodka.”

  I thought about those innocuous miniatures strewn over Beatrix Potter characters, the bag of pills. Motherhood had not brought Helen the peace she craved. It was not the solution. If anything, having the twins had compounded all of Helen’s insecurities and sent her spiraling out of control. I wanted so much for Helen’s death to be an accident because then I could stop imagining Helen going into the nursery for the last time and kissing her children goodbye, knowing she was never going to see them again. I didn’t want to think that my friend had sunk so low that she thought killing herself and her husband was the answer. “Ben, I haven’t been having the best of times recently, but I promise you, it wasn’t even an accident, it was nothing.”

  He looked even more concerned now. “What do you mean, haven’t been having the best of times?”

  “I’ve been wasting so much time peering over the fence at you lot, wondering how the hell I can get over, that I’ve forgotten how to enjoy it over on my side. Life is pretty good over here; it has many, many advantages.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” said Ben. “We’re the ones who are jealous of you, didn’t you know that?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t believe him, of course. It was one of those perfect lies that Ben told me all the time to make me feel better about myself. Lies that a few days earlier I would have chosen to believe. But things were different now. A seismic shift had taken place. Helen’s death had altered everything. I couldn’t pretend to myself, or anyone else, that my view on life hadn’t changed—suddenly, dramatically, changed for ever.

  “Everything looks different from where I’m standing now and that is because of Helen. My only regret is that I didn’t see it sooner.” I looked at Ben. “I honestly feel I’ve got her in here, a piece of her.” A pretty big piece, since there weren’t a lot of people to share her memory with. “Ben, she had so much potential.” I felt the tears again—was it possible there were still more? “I don’t want to be like that…”

  “You’re not.”

  I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands.

  “One of the headhunters I called to arrange an interview with asked me whether I would be interested in a posting abroad.”

  “What did you say?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. It was this week, I missed it.”

  “Tessa, you should have gone.”

  “I couldn’t. Until I know what’s happening with the twins, I can’t leave them.”

  “They’re not your sole responsibility,” said Ben.

  “They are for the moment,” I insisted. “Until something better comes along.”

  We walked along in silence for a while. “You’ll rearrange the interview though, right? You know what the job market is like, the longer you stay out, the harder it is to get back in.”

  I must do that, I reminded myself. I nodded then fussed with the blanket covering the sleeping babies.

  “So what did you say about moving abroad?”

  I’d said no, of course. But I wasn’t so sure. I looked at Ben. I was free to go anywhere in the world. I looked back at the twins. Then again, maybe I wasn’t. “I said I’d think about it. Forty is not as far off as I’d like. I’ve been doing the same thing for nearly twenty years. Twenty years, Ben! Where did that time go?”

  “I don’t know, Tessa, but I tell you one thing, it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without you.”

  There was that word again: fun…“Thank you,” I said. “But I don’t think you really understand what I’ve been saying.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do, Tessa.”

  “You don’t. I’m not here just for you to have fun with!”

  “But I don’t have fun with anyone else.”

  “Yes, you do! You have fun with Sasha.” I stressed her name. If I didn’t get this point across we were back to the beginning and God might think I’d ducked again and kill off my mother. “I’m the one who doesn’t have fun with anyone else, because I haven’t got an anyone else.”

  “We have a nice time, sure, but it isn’t fun, fun, fun. It’s talking about whether to have chicken or steak for dinner. It’s about whether to take the promotion or move to Germany. It’s life stuff. It isn’t fun. You, on the other hand, have fun with everyone. Everyone adores you. Everyone who meets you adores you. You have more fun than anyone I know.”

  “I’m not going to argue about who has more fun with whom. It’s ridiculous. All I’m saying…” />
  “Yes?”

  “All I’m saying is…”

  “Yes?”

  “What I’m trying to say is…”

  “What?”

  “I wish we’d stayed in that passageway.”

  In Ben and Tessa speak, you can’t get more clearer than that.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Oh, indeed.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting from this monumental revelation, but “Oh,” followed by a swift departure through the woods, wasn’t it. He had the decency to look at his watch first, then gawp at the time, and make the old excuse about a forgotten meeting. Before hugging me and telling me that I was the most precious thing to him, before hurrying off down one of Holland Park’s many paths. But that was basically it. “Oh.” Followed by a swift departure. I had imagined so many variations, over so many years—how was it possible that I hadn’t imagined that one? Surely the possibilities were finite. Surely I’d covered all angles. But no: “Oh” it was. “Oh,” indeed. I sat on a hard bench in the Zen garden and watched koi fish blow kisses at me. I concentrated on them for a minute or two, until the numbness I was feeling faded.

  Now, of course, the truth was all too apparent. “Oh” was the only ending to this. What on earth was he going to say? Sorry? That was too patronizing. Me too, let’s get married? No, because he was married to an amazing woman whom he adored. Me too, let’s have an affair? No, because he was an amazing man married to an amazing woman whom he adored. The reality was that “Oh” was the only answer. I hadn’t been dealing in reality, though; I’d been playing make-believe. The game had gone on for so long that I had lost my grip on reality. I will forever be sorry that Helen had to die in order for me to realize that I’d been sleepwalking through life. When the twins started to stir, I stood up and began pushing them home. Feeding time at the zoo came round quickly. I increased my pace.

  When I got home, I mean Helen’s home, I recognized the shabby brown Volvo parked opposite. It was incongruous among the Cayennes and Range Rovers. There wasn’t anyone in the world I was happier to see, except Helen, of course.

  “Fran!”

  “The housekeeper said you’d be back at 2:30, and you’re bang on.”

  “Amazing how quickly you get into a routine,” I replied, smiling down at the twins.

  Francesca got out of the car and looked into the pram. “Wow, you forget how small they can be.”

  “How dare you…These boys are enormous.”

  Francesca looked at me, then hugged me. “You all right?”

  My friend was dead, Cora was in hospital with pneumonia, Billy and I had fought and I’d just ended a twenty-year imaginary relationship. I rocked my hand back and forth. I was doing so-so. I waited for the lump to let go of my throat.

  “How’s Caspar?”

  “He’s OK for the moment. He wanted to come and see you, actually, make sure you’re holding up.”

  “Tell him I am. Just. I spoke to Nick, that feels like a long time ago. I’d only just heard.” I tried to clear my head of the memory. “How is he, you haven’t…”

  “Said anything?” Francesca shook her head. “No, but he’s getting a bit freaked out by all the love notes I keep leaving him.”

  I managed a weak smile. “And the girls?”

  We walked back to her car to place the ticket on the dashboard. “Katie wanted a pair of knickers with cherries on the front. One had a bite out of it. She’s still not speaking to me.” She shook her head. “If I’d known what I was letting myself in for…” She shook her head again. “Just as you get over one hurdle, another looms in front of you.” Francesca had been trying to cheer me up and for a moment it had worked, but for some reason I found that last scenario really disturbing. Maybe that was her point. We ambled back to the house.

  “You heard about Cora?” I asked.

  “Poor Billy. I just popped by the hospital with some more expertly made cupcakes. She rang and told us what had happened.”

  “I was an arsehole.”

  “Huh?”

  “We had a fight. She didn’t tell you?”

  “No. She just told me about the nightmare with Cora.”

  I stared into the pram. Two moon faces peered back at me. I had a very new, very real litmus paper for life. Gone were the days of creating storms in teacups. Gone were the days of making mountains out of molehills. Amazing how unimportant many things had now become. “I went over there and like an idiot got all heavy about Christoph.”

  “Probably not the best timing.”

  “You think?” I started humping the pram up the steps.

  “Do you want help?”

  “Actually, I’m getting the hang of this monstrous thing.”

  “So what happened with Billy?”

  I gave her the quick version, without the usual Tessa King revisionism. I unbuckled the babies, handed Tommy over to Francesca and followed her downstairs with Bobby.

  “I promise you, she didn’t mention it. In fact, she’s concerned about you, as we all are. She knows about Helen and Neil, obviously. So please don’t worry about a silly argument.” She looked down at Tommy. “What’s happened kind of puts everything into perspective.”

  She was right about that.

  We stowed the twins safely in their matching bouncy chairs, ready for take-off. Thankfully, I was no longer confounded by the NASA-style harnesses you had to strap them in and out of twenty times a day. Next job was to make their bottles. Seven scoops in seven fluid ounces. Repeat. Quick shake, repeat, and hey presto—meal for two.

  “How are these little ones?” asked Francesca, playing with them while I stood behind the vast stainless-steel kitchen island.

  “They’re getting a bit fussy, actually. I think they know Helen isn’t coming back. It breaks my heart just to think about it. Tommy is much happier now on goat’s milk, though, he’s not been sick since, but he’s more needy. He likes to be cuddled all the time. And Bobby just keeps looking around like he’s lost something. You know when you go into a room to get something, then forget what it is, so you look around trying to remember what it is you’ve forgotten? That’s exactly the expression on Bobby’s face. And it’s weird, because sometimes he looks just like Helen. Helen without the skin coloring. They’re actually very cute, you’ve never felt anything so soft as their ridiculous cheeks.”

  Francesca looked at me strangely.

  “What?”

  “Listen to you.”

  I felt foolish. It must have registered on my face.

  “No. It’s nice. Just, maybe you should be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “Falling too much in love.”

  “With the twins? That’s not going to happen. Between you and me,” I said lowering my voice, “I never even liked them.”

  “That was then.”

  I handed a bottle to Francesca, and we sat on the sofa with one baby each. “Rose does this most of the time, but I don’t want her getting too tired, she must be in her fifties by now.”

  “Where is Rose?”

  “We have a little system going. She does the mornings, I do the afternoons and then she comes back to help me with bath-time. It’s working pretty well.” I glanced at my watch, I never knew what it was going to say. I seemed to have lost my sense of time and place. Sometimes hours flashed by in minutes with the twins, other times they ticked past excruciatingly slowly. “We make a right pair, she and I.”

  “Tessa…”

  I stared down at Bobby. His big eyes looked up at me. I smiled at him as he sucked hungrily. “I like being here, Fran. The twins keep me busy. This terrible, terrible thing has happened, but bang on eleven o’clock those boys need feeding. You’ve got no choice but to go on. It’s a blessed relief. I hate it when they go to bed. Too much thinking time. Except there’s washing to do and bottles to sterilize and sheets to change. I’m sort of hoping that if I keep on going through the motions, eventually the motions will feel real again.” They were being fussy, th
ey didn’t like being put down, they needed to know I was close by. Me. Not Rose. Me. They smiled at me whenever I looked their way. I couldn’t get enough of those wide, wet, gummy mouths grinning at me, so I looked their way a lot. They were terrible time-wasters. Francesca was right, of course, I’d fallen—hook, line and sinker. It had taken three days. Sasha had been right too. Being a parent didn’t have to begin with birth.

  “I think Tommy is getting teeth,” I said, apropos of nothing. “Two, right at the bottom.”

  “Tessa, what’s going to happen to the twins, where are they going to go?”

  A happy home.

  “I don’t know. Helen left it up to me to decide.”

  “You need to make that decision then. They can’t stay in limbo.”

  Why not? I was rather liking this limbo. Nothing hurt as much when I was with them. “No decisions will be made until after the funeral.”

  “On Thursday, right? The 28th.”

  “I don’t know. Marguerite is organizing it.”

  “It is. I read the announcement in the paper. Don’t worry, we’ll be there.”

  “What announcement?”

  “The Times. Yesterday. Both of them are being buried up the hill at St. John’s.”

  I swore, then apologized to the twins, who looked at me quizzically. “The body hasn’t even been released yet,” I whispered.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what it said.” She lifted Tommy over her shoulder to wind him.

  “Actually, he’s better if you just sit him on your knee and lean him forward,” I said. Francesca smiled at me. “Marguerite wants the boys, of course; she’s already staked a claim. Whatever I decide, there will be a fight because they aren’t going to that witch. She hasn’t even had the decency to tell me about the funeral, which, by the way, Helen didn’t want, and to be buried with him…” I growled. Bobby’s face creased in concern. “Sorry, hon, shh, not you…”

  “You know what I think?”

  That I’d make a perfect mother? I looked at Francesca expectantly.

  “I think that you should consider Claudia and Al. Claudia is their godmother too, isn’t she? They’ve been trying to have a family for years, they’re set up for it. They have a lovely house and Claudia would be a spectacular mother, and Al, well, you can’t fault Al. They want children, and those babies need parents. They’d make such a happy family.”