She picked up a stray branflake from the table, crumbled it to dust. ‘I couldn’t get married anyway, not if I go on with my degree. I can hardly commute from Newcastle to Balliol.’
‘Have you told the powers-that-be yet – your tutors, or the Dean?’
‘No fear! I don’t intend to. I’ll just turn up next term and carry on as if nothing’s any different.’
‘But surely it’ll show by then?’
Tessa shrugged, crushed a second branflake with something close to anger. She’d dumped all these painful issues in the cellar of her mind, and now Alexandra was trying to drag them out again, expose them to the light. She turned the radio right down, sagged back in her chair. The jokey announcer was getting on her nerves, and even the sun seemed intrusive and insensitive, showing up the dirt in the messy, jumbled kitchen.
‘They may insist you take a year off,’ Alex pondered. ‘I mean, there’s no crèche or anything. Oxford’s positively medieval when it comes to things like nurseries.’
‘I know,’ said Tessa shortly.
‘Would your mother help at all?’
‘I haven’t told her.’ Tessa studied the cereal packet, pretending to be engrossed in the amounts of vitamins and minerals provided by an average portion. There were a score of different reasons why she wished to spare her mother – and also spare herself from a tidal wave of advice and speculation, lamentation, drama.
‘But you won’t be able to hide it for much longer. Anyway, I thought you said she was coming up to stay.’
‘Yes, she is – next week.’
There was silence for a moment – just the sound of Alexandra’s spoon scraping the last branflakes from her bowl. ‘Tessa …’ she began again.
‘What?’
She had pushed the bowl away now – preparing her next onslaught, Tessa guessed.
‘Look, if Lord Muck says he won’t cough up, I‘ll chip in with something. It can’t be much – I’m in debt up to my eyebrows – but I can probably help in other ways. I mean, I don’t mind babysitting when you’ve got lectures or tutorials, and I’ll even wash your rotten nappies, though only if you’re really pushed.’
Tessa shook her head, too choked to speak. Grouchy Alexandra was offering help – and cash – yet her overdraft was already pretty hefty, and unlike well-heeled Charlotte, she didn’t come from a three-car, three-bathroom home. Her father was an insurance salesman who’d just been made redundant, so she was obliged to work herself during the whole of the long vacation.
‘Tessa, listen will you? Liz and me and Vicky have already had a chat about it, and we’ve agreed we’ll all muck in, do a sort of rota – you know, looking after the kid, giving it its bottle, or whatever the fuck they have. That way, you won’t be landed with the whole caboodle. Hell! There’s no need to cry, mate. It was meant to cheer you up.’
Tessa gave Alex a brief, embarrassed hug, then fled upstairs to her room. She was cheered up – more touched than she could say, yet tears were streaming down her face – tears for all she’d lost: Michael, marriage, security, the name Edwards for her child. She had asked for absolutely nothing in her letter – no money and no ties. It had required great strength of will; taken days of heart-searching, and, in the end, she’d been influenced by Heloïse. Yet how could she explain that she’d let herself be swayed by the arguments of a precocious female scholar who’d lived more than eight hundred years ago, and who had languished in a nunnery for most of her tormented life, after the trauma of her own affair? Alex would dismiss her as a nutcase.
She picked up her copy of the Letters of Abelard and Heloïse, which she kept on the bedside table, close to Michael’s cards. It should have been packed away by now, along with Saint Bernard, Guibert, Suger and the rest. She had finished with the whole subject of Early Gothic France; would be moving on in her second year to something completely different – nineteenth-century English History: Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone. Yet Heloïse continued to obsess her; had become so important in her life – almost a physical presence – it would be impossible to consign her to the bottom of a suitcase. She sometimes actually found herself involved in conversations with her, discussing love, or loneliness, or asking her advice, as if she were a loving elder sister, or a soul-mate. She would rather die than admit it to her friends. It seemed so bizarre, so childish – if not downright mad – to be communing with a minor historical character on the syllabus, but she had never felt more sane, in fact. The pregnancy had grounded her, brought her face to face with stark realities. It had also provided a further link with Heloïse. The parallels between them were uncanny – both roughly the same age, both students, and both tall, both pregnant out of marriage, and both shatteringly in love with a selfish, headstrong, yet charismatic man. And it was precisely because of Abelard’s great gifts that Heloïse had opposed his offer of marriage; couldn’t bear to shackle him with sordid duties and petty obligations, which might dull his restless brilliance.
She sprawled out on the bed, began flicking through the Letters, looking for that section of the Historia Calamitatum where Abelard reported her selfless reasons for refusing any legal tie.
‘Think of the situation marriage would inflict on you,’ Heloïse had protested. ‘What harmony can there be between scholarship and running a home, between a desk and a cradle, a book and a distaff …? Is there anywhere a man who, with his mind on Scripture or philosophy, can endure the wailings of a new-born child?’
She re-read the words, as she’d done umpteen times already. If you changed ‘desk’ to scalpel, and ‘Scripture’ to surgery, they fitted Michael perfectly – which is why she’d paraphrased them in her own letter. The more she reflected on Heloïse’s brand of love, the more she was attracted by its unselfishness, high-mindedness – the refusal to involve a philosopher of genius in an infant’s sick and shit, or drag his mind from God to cots and colic. Heloïse had loathed the thought of being not a helpmate but a burden, of preventing his huge talent from benefiting all mankind, not one mere wife and child. Didn’t the same apply to Michael? Once he became a leading heart-surgeon, he’d be transforming lives, even saving lives – unless her own demands distracted him.
The whole nub of Heloïse’s case was not to make demands; to spurn rewards, security, and give instead of take. Tessa leafed on through the pages to find Heloïse’s reply to the Historia, written years after the love affair, when she was abbess of her convent and so vowed to a life of total celibacy. Yet though she had renounced sex, she still burned for it in secret; still hungered after Abelard, who was more her god than God. That only proved how great had been her sacrifice, to renounce not just the world, but the man who was the world to her. In her letter, she complained to her once-lover that he’d failed to grasp the essence of her argument – that she had preferred love to marriage, freedom to chains, and had sought nothing for herself except the chance to please and serve him. ‘The term ‘‘wife’’,’ she had confided, ‘may seem more sacred or more binding, but another term was always dearer to my heart – that of your mistress, or even of your concubine, your whore …’
How extraordinary it was that Heloïse had used those words – Michael’s words – which must have sounded blasphemous in the mouth of a chaste nun. And there were other similarities between them. Heloïse was probably illegitimate – there was no mention of parents, and she’d been brought up by her uncle – and though she herself had April (with Dave vaguely in the background), she was also what was bravely called a love-child. Yet she mustn’t push the analogy too far. Twentieth-century attitudes were so completely different that it was unfair – and unhistorical – to see her own predicament in terms of Heloïse’s. Despite all the angst and heartache, her situation was simpler altogether, and she had far less to lose. No one would entomb her in a convent, or remove her precious child, and once Michael realized she was no threat to his freedom, was there anything to stop them resuming their relationship?
The noise of a car backfiring in the street outside suddenl
y blasted her back to the present. She’d be late for Duncan Collingsby if she didn’t get a move on. She put her favourite book away; wrenched her thoughts from Heloïse to the Tudor Revolution, and how she’d teach her dozy pupil to memorize the sequence of Henry VIII’s six wives. She peeled off her nightie, sorted through her clothes for a chic but loosish dress, which would help her play the part of a well-paid history tutor whilst concealing any suspicion of a bulge. She brushed her tangled hair, recalling how she’d let it fall like a yashmak over Michael’s thighs, the last time they’d made love, then wound the strands around his stiffening prick, binding them together. They were bound, inextricably – and most especially by their child, who was already half his birth-length, could breathe, digest and pee, and was about to sprout his own hair. She owed it to the baby to be calm. The first weeks of his life she’d spent in storms of tears or rage, so now she must seek to cultivate an inner peace and harmony – whatever Michael said in his reply.
She deliberately slowed her movements as she dressed and made the bed, then strolled downstairs to check the fridge and store-cupboard and scribble a brief shopping-list, and was finally turning out of Juxon Street at exactly 10.15. She loved the street, with its brightly-painted houses and their obstreperous front gardens where flowers and weeds battled for supremacy; the faint rumble from the local factory, which Alexandra bitched about, but she found reassuring. This particular patch of Oxford was called Jericho, and though only fifteen minutes’ walk away from the centre of the town, it seemed a separate village, with its Bohemian atmosphere, its own small shops and restaurants, the picturesque canal.
She crossed Walton Street – its thoroughfare – glancing to her right, as always, at the Radcliffe Infirmary, a few yards further down. It had been built two centuries earlier than the John Radcliffe in Headington, and was another reminder of Michael, since he’d worked there for a while. It seemed strange that he was no longer sharing Oxford with her, and a week ago she’d been missing him so badly, she had cycled up Headington Hill to visit the JR, as if the mere fact of her returning to his former territory might somehow bring him back.
She had wandered into the foyer of the maternity department; been halted in her tracks by a white-draped showpiece crib, complete with doll inside. The doll was stiff and waxen – eyes shut, face impassive – dressed in a white bonnet and old-fashioned lacy gown. ‘PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH‘, the notice said, and she’d backed away obediently, though the image of that torpid form had lodged deep in her mind. If only her own baby were just a sleeping doll – not alive, not growing every hour. Her spirits had sunk lower still when she looked up at the blackboard with its chalked-on visiting times, most prefaced by the tag: ‘Husbands and partners only’. She had no partner, no one to support her when she finally went into labour; no one to accompany her on her ante-natal visits, like these couples flocking through the door; men arm in arm with their pregnant wives or girlfriends. She had followed them downstairs, stared in horror at the grossly swollen bellies; the lurid posters warning of the risks involved – rubella, diabetes, toxoplasmosis. This was not her world, but an alien and frightening one, in total contrast to normal student life, where the only major worries were finishing your essay or wondering if the bank would increase your overdraft. She had blundered blindly out again, ignoring the receptionist, who was eyeing her suspiciously. Since then, she had resolved to keep clear of all such clinics. Heloïse had managed without people poking and probing her, or alarming her with scare-stories.
Today, she felt much stronger; easier in her mind now she’d got her letter off to Michael, and cheered by Alexandra’s change of heart. She was not alone – not really – had generous friends, a job; wasn’t a poor skivvy living fifty years ago, who’d be sacked without a penny’s compensation for daring to be pregnant out of marriage, or marched weeping through the streets as an example to the rest. It was true she had felt a certain shame, an instinct to apologize, hide herself away, but that was going to change. She’d accept her pregnant state, be proud of it, even flaunt it; maybe hunt down a maternity dress in the trendy second-hand shop she’d discovered recently, just two streets from the house. She’d drop in there on the way back from the Collingsbys’, return to Alexandra not just with cheese and wine, but with her first designer smock.
The noise and laughter could be heard from three doors down – a full-scale party at their house, judging by the din, which had overflowed outdoors. Tessa walked down the side passage, saw three small boys rolling in the unmown grass, and various mothers, aunts and cousins reclining on a picnic rug, quaffing plastic cups of wine.
‘Ah, the grub!’ said Alex, striding out to meet her. ‘I hope to God there’s enough. Julie said her family, but this is more like an army. At least they brought a stack of booze, so we can save ours for the next invasion. Grab yourself a glass. You look completely knackered.’
‘Let me just dump this lot first. The bottles weigh a ton.’
Alexandra followed her into the kitchen, started unloading all the bags. ‘Oh, by the way, that letter’s come. The writing’s so appalling, I thought it wasn’t ours at first, and was about to bung it back, but then I saw the Newcastle postmark.’ She fetched it from the mantelpiece, stood peering at the stamp.
Tessa had to restrain herself from snatching it away. Alexandra’s hands were dirty, and the envelope was already stained and creased. How dare she mess it up like that – something so important, a precious part of Michael? Yet she almost dreaded opening it; wasn’t quite prepared. It had come too soon, caught her unawares, despite the fact that she had thought of nothing else since she’d dropped her own letter in the post-box. Michael must have written back immediately, sat straight down and dashed off his reply. Her hand was shaking as she reached out for the envelope; droplets of cold sweat snailing down between her breasts.
‘Well, open it – go on.’ Alex moved in closer, consumed with curiosity, evidently expecting to be regaled with all the details.
‘I … think I’d better change first. I’m boiling in this dress.’ Tessa bolted up to her room, stood by the window, tracing the first line on the envelope – the exuberant looping T; the ‘Reeves’ little more than a boisterous blotchy doodle. What Alex had disparaged as ‘appalling scrawl’ had become something she respected: confirmation of Michael’s hectic schedule. A calligrapher might have time to cross his t’s or dot his i’s, but a surgeon was too busy fighting death.
She slit the letter open with a nail-file, didn’t want to tear it, when it was something she would keep for ever. One of the children in the garden was screaming that he’d grazed his knee – expiring, by the sounds of it. How could she read the most crucial letter of her life with those anguished yells resounding through the neighbourhood?
‘Hi, Tessa!’ Julie called, suddenly catching sight of her and waving with her empty glass. ‘Come down and join the party!’
‘In a sec,’ she shouted back, gazing beyond Julie to the ancient deserted cemetery which adjoined the Juxon Street back gardens. She sometimes went there for a stroll, or to escape the hubbub of the town, though Alex thought it ghoulish to take one’s recreation in a graveyard. It was really like another garden – a secret place guarded by tall trees, full of shrubs and tangled flowers, and much quieter in late August when the factory shut down. It would be the perfect spot to read her private letter. She had never met another living soul there, and even some of the locals didn’t know of its existence.
She crept down the stairs as quietly as she could, hoping to sidle out unnoticed.
‘I thought you’d gone to change,’ Alexandra challenged her, emerging from the kitchen.
‘Yes, I had,’ said Tessa. ‘But… but I left something at Duncan’s, so I’m just going back to fetch it. They’ll be out all afternoon.’
‘Poor you! It’s a bloody pain in this heat to slog up there again. Has your bike still got a puncture?’
‘Two!’ Tessa escaped into the street, the letter burning in her hand. She felt d
ecidedly less harassed as she closed the gates of St Sepulchre’s behind her, entered her green sanctuary. Today it seemed especially lush, as if it had laid on all its bounty to celebrate the fact that Michael had replied so quickly, not kept her in suspense. Swags of glossy elderberries galaxied the bushes; a pair of peacock butterflies were courting in the sun, skimming from a blowzy rose to a burst of yellow ragwort. Even the weeds looked luxuriant and fertile – soft-lipped nettles flowering in the undergrowth; the frothy lace of hedge-parsley emitting its rank scent. She was glad she had left the party, didn’t need all that raucous giggly company; had her own built-in companion in Michael junior. She always assumed he was a boy, and would be tall like both his parents – dark-haired, dark-eyed, and in every way exceptional. She was sure Michael would adore his son, once he’d recovered from the shock; see him as another (miniature) archangel; maybe even start planning his career – Eton, Christ Church, a professorship in surgery.
‘Listen, kid,’ she told him, pressing her palm against her belly. ‘This is a letter from your father, and we’re going to sit down here and read it.’
But the minute she sat down, she was up again and pacing, too nervous to keep still. The letter seemed untypical of Michael – four folded sheets instead of two scant lines. What could he be saying in all those words and words and words? – though in cool objective fact, it didn’t matter. She had made her own decision, and didn’t need anyone to sanction it, support it – not partner, mother, doctor or do-gooder. So why was she so agitated, unable even to walk straight, but lurching round in circles? Often, when she came here, she studied the inscriptions engraved into the stones – those she could still read, which hadn’t flaked away or crumbled like their owners in the coffins. She had grown to love the graves, which seemed a reminder of the ones outside her college room, though these were even older – moss-encrusted, mouldering, wonderfully romantic. Or sometimes she picked flowers: tiny secret vetches, tall ragged-petalled daisies, a blazing scarlet rose. But today she couldn’t concentrate, and her hands were full already – weighed down by four huge sheets of bronze.
Michael, Michael Page 16