My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  Their time in bed made her love Harry more than ever, in a slightly dotty way, at once hypnotised and ravenous. It also had the strange effect of making her fall rather in love with herself. Ruth’s body was not something she had ever thought much about. She carried it around, dressed it, fed it when it was hungry. When she looked in the glass before going out for an evening she occasionally tutted at her unshapely legs, her disobliging hair. Now she found herself amazed at her own flesh while she bathed, at her heavy breasts and the freckles on her forearms. She suddenly felt for the first time that she was beautiful.

  Back in London they took a first- and second-floor maisonette in Pimlico, in Alderney Street. On the lower floor was a drawing room, with a pair of graceful windows to the floor. The boudoir grand piano which had been Harry’s wedding gift to her was here. There was a dining room and, at the back, a kitchen with a tiny larder off it. Upstairs was their bedroom, a dressing room for Harry and – the thing that Ruth loved best about their new home – a bathroom much bigger than any other she knew of in London. As if to do justice to their ample surrounds, the basin and bath were enormous. Ruth installed a chaise longue under the bathroom window, so that she and Harry could keep each other company while one of them was soaking.

  She rode her bicycle up to the Royal College every morning, while Harry took the underground to work. A char came in three times a week, to launder Harry’s work shirts and do the heavy cleaning, such as it was. Ruth arrived home well before her husband in the afternoons, in plenty of time to start preparing their dinner. Usually she practised the piano for an hour, or sang. She taught herself to cook out of a book: steak Diane, chicken à la King. Often they went to bed as soon as Harry got home, almost before he had had time to take off his coat. Afterwards they sat flushed and naked in bed, and drank sherry out of the prim cut-glass glasses they had been given as a wedding present. Sometimes they did not get up again, but one of them went down to the kitchen in a dressing gown to fetch cheese and water biscuits, which infested the sheets with huge prickly crumbs.

  It was after their first Christmas as a married couple that Harry began to make noises about babies. Ruth secretly blamed his family, who – perhaps reminded of infants by the festivities attendant on the baby Jesus – kept dropping heavy hints. Even Verity, who showed no inclination of her own to reproduce, was a culprit. Ruth found this treacherous of her old friend, who had always made so much of women’s careers. Harry was so genial, so dear: they never quarrelled. She never denied him anything, because he asked for so little, only her affection and interest, which came naturally. Sometimes it was rather a slog, getting up early to catch the train to Richmond every Sunday for Mass with the Longdens, followed by lunch back at their house, but it was only natural that they should see more of his family than of hers, because they lived so much nearer. And they were a proper family, she reminded herself, not like hers.

  She adored Harry, she wanted to please him, but she did want, too, to finish her studies before having a baby; or at least, that was the official reason.

  ‘They don’t come overnight, you know,’ said Harry. ‘We could start now and you’d still be fine for your exams in June. I mean, it wouldn’t arrive ’til ages afterwards.’

  ‘I can’t appear at the College bulging! It would be too … I don’t know. Too odd. Conspicuous. I’d just feel funny, being the only one. I’m the only one who’s married as it is. Everyone else goes back to boiled dinners in digs. I’m the only one with a home of my own, who cooks.’ She frowned.

  ‘I know, darling. Don’t panic. No need to look so cross.’

  ‘I’m not cross. I don’t feel cross. I only feel torn, you see, because I don’t want to disappoint you.’

  ‘Speckle, you never disappoint me.’

  ‘So can we have a baby later, after the summer?’

  It never occurred to her that she might experience any difficulty in the getting of a baby: she assumed that all she would have to do was not use the contraceptive device. As it turned out she was right. At Easter they went to stay with Iris for a few days. Birdle, who generally reserved his worst bites for men, had taken a shine to Harry on sight. As soon as Harry came into the room, he shrieked in recognition, although he had not seen him for several months.

  ‘Stop that racket at once, Birdle,’ Iris snapped. She was not altogether pleased when Birdle liked anyone besides herself. But he continued whistling and squawking. Only when Harry went and stroked the feathers at the back of the bird’s head did he fall quiet. He drooped with pleasure, bowing his head with the uncharacteristic meekness of a spaniel.

  They planned to spend a night in the Lake District on their way back to London. The inn was a low building of whitewashed stone, with polished slate floors. But their room was in a flimsily built wing at the back, with narrow twin beds and thin walls. It had a mildewy smell, not altogether unpleasant, like a hymn book. They spent the afternoon walking before coming back to the place for supper. Installed in their room, they could hear a woman’s voice from the next room. The words were muffled but the tone was clear – she was recounting a tale of grievance, which caused her voice to grow shriller every few moments – and every now and again a second voice, a man’s, responded with a single gruff syllable. The thought that these neighbours would be able to hear them as vividly on the other side of the wall struck them as both comic and aphrodisiac. They kissed, suppressing laughter, before landing on one of the beds, clothes half on. They felt as pleased and as naughty as children enjoying a midnight feast. In the scrummage there was no time for Ruth to pad down the landing to the bathroom, with its damp-ruckled linoleum, to install the device.

  Soon after she’d finished her final examinations it became evident to Ruth that changes were taking place in her body. Her nipples darkened and prickled. Sleep tugged her into its depths with the irresistible pull of a tide. She hadn’t missed her periods exactly, but with hindsight she realised that they hadn’t lasted as long as usual. One Sunday at her in-laws, the smell of roasting lamb suddenly caught in her throat with a cloying bloody sweetness. Brushing her teeth in the morning a few days later, she abruptly disgorged the cup of tea she had drunk minutes earlier into the toothpaste-foamed spit in the basin.

  That evening she and Harry were to meet at the Albert Hall for a concert. She was early.

  ‘There you are!’ he said in greeting, as if he had been waiting for her and not the other way round. ‘Hello, that’s a worried little face,’ he added, looking closely now, noticing her pallor.

  ‘No, I’m not. Actually I think I might be …’ Ruth found that she could not face saying the words. ‘I think the thing that you’ve been wanting – I mean the baby thing – I think it might be happening.’

  Harry beamed at her. ‘Really? Have you been to the doctor? Are you sure?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I don’t really know. But I do think so.’

  ‘Darling. Darling girl.’ All the way through the concert he kept her hand in his, just a little too tightly, tucked under his arm.

  She could not feel that the baby was an actual baby until it appeared, not really. For now it was just a thing, like an acorn. Even as she became larger and more cumbrous she found it hard to imagine that a new and separate life was taking shape within her. Iris sent a cobweb of a shawl, made of the finest wool, as light as candyfloss. Her mother-in-law offered to come into town and take her shopping for the baby’s layette: tiny cream-coloured Viyella nightgowns, cardigans, vests which fastened on one side with ribbon, loosely knitted blankets edged with thick satin. When she got home she took these things out of their stiff cardboard boxes and tissue-paper wrapping and laid them out on the divan in Harry’s dressing room, which was to become the nursery. She stood and looked down at the baby’s things and tried to feel connected to them – willed herself to feel moved by the pathos of their smallness – but she could not. It was like looking at photographs of someone else’s garden.

  Time seemed to slacken. Whole days went by when she d
id nothing at all: she barely touched the piano, could hardly drag her pen across the page to write letters. Books idled unread in her hands. When she tried to sing her voice went out of tune. There was often only cold veal and ham pie for supper, ready sliced at the grocer’s, with cold beetroot. She never stopped yawning, but slept only fitfully: the lump pressed uncomfortably against her bladder, her lungs, her ribs. Every day when Harry came home he talked about what was going on in the world, but she had nothing to say, because she didn’t mind. She thought she would never care about anything again.

  But when the nurse handed her baby girl to her, all clean and swaddled, already bathed – how had there been time? – and smelling of powder, Ruth felt something give way inside her chest, like a silent sneeze. Looking into her baby’s tight little face, she felt a great welling up of emotion. It seemed utterly miraculous that a mere fourteen hours of labour could produce this entirely new being, so familiar and yet so strange. The baby hardly looked like a baby at all, but like a very small very old person, wise and well travelled, with her own secrets. The baby’s pink fingers waved open and shut like the fronds of a sea anemone. Her tiny fingernails gleamed as if buffed. She snuffled adorably. Her gaze seemed both penetrating and unfocused. She was furled and quite magical.

  When the linen had been changed and straightened and she had combed her hair, Harry came in to see her. Ruth hoped that he would not ask to hold his new daughter, because she could not bear to let her go, not even for a second. She could smell London streets in the gabardine of his coat as he stood beside the bed. He seemed shy and too big for the room. A nurse brought a tray, with tea and Lincoln biscuits. The biscuits were round, with little raised dots on one side which tickled the roof of her mouth as they turned mushy. These were the best biscuits Ruth had ever tasted, so crisp and sweet and biscuity. She did not think she had tasted anything as delicious in all her life. She could not imagine why anyone would ever wish to eat anything else. How had she existed, all these years, without ever considering Lincoln biscuits? To think, she had been given a baby, and now these wonderfully good biscuits! She felt so overwhelmed, so lucky, that tears gathered in her eyes.

  People kept talking to her, but she could not quite make out what they wanted. Asking her things she did not know the answers to. Harry wondered if there was anything she needed him to bring, whether she would like to sleep now, whether he should bring the family to see the baby today or tomorrow. A nurse asked if she needed help to go and spend a penny. All she wanted was to be alone with her baby. She smiled wanly and kept saying thank you, in the hope they would go away.

  At last they were alone in the room, she and Isobel. Isobel. As soon as everyone had gone she knew this was the baby’s name. Could it really be that Iris had had such feelings for her, when she was born? That all mothers loved their babies this intensely? It barely seemed possible. Ruth began to sing quietly, her lips just touching the top of the baby’s head:

  ‘Row, row, row your boat

  Gently down the stream

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

  Life is but a dream.’

  An image of little Isobel lying in a shallow boat among river reeds came to Ruth. It brought to mind poor baby Moses, left alone among the bulrushes; or the shadowy, grieving Lady of Shalott, only of course the Lady of Shalott was not a baby, but a grown woman. All at once the song struck Ruth as tragic, its gaiety a mask for the sorrow and transience of life. Isobel could not row a boat, gently or otherwise: she couldn’t do anything for herself. Ruth would have to do it for her. She would have to be valiant on her daughter’s behalf. She remembered Iris, sitting, arms around her knees, on an eiderdown in the makeshift air-raid shelter during the Blitz at the old London house. She remembered the special chocolates they’d eaten together – how the sweetness of them had obliterated the bitter smell of the coal – and how her mother had made it seem fun, an adventure. Now she had a child of her own she understood, all of a sudden, why Iris had never seemed afraid. It was because you could not – you must not – let your child see that you were frightened. Your task was to protect the child. Any chink of fear betrayed that covenant. And this seemed so daunting, so big a thing to be able to fulfil, that Ruth could hardly believe it was expected of her.

  Chapter 5

  Birdle, with an exaggerated side-swaying gait like a parody of a drunken sailor’s, advanced across the back of the sofa. He looked around with a beady, furtive air and then hopped down once, twice, until he reached the rug where Isobel was undressing her doll in front of the fire. After pausing to make sure he was unobserved, he scuttled across its woollen fronds and bit her on the knee. The child wailed. Birdle pretended to be startled by the sudden noise and flapped up to the back of the armchair where Iris was sitting, Player’s untipped cigarette in one hand, newspaper folded in the other.

  ‘Mummy! You’ll really have to put him in his cage. He’s bitten Isobel again!’ cried Ruth.

  ‘Naughty Birdle,’ said Iris, without conviction.

  ‘Ghastly,’ cawed Birdle, bowing up and down like an agitated waiter. ‘Ghastly.’

  Iris smirked behind The Times.

  ‘It isn’t funny,’ said Ruth, bending to kiss the knee better, enjoying – despite herself, despite the child’s pain – the chubby, quilted feel of the flesh on the limb her daughter proffered.

  ‘Poor darling,’ said Iris. It was not plain whether she was referring to the parrot or her granddaughter.

  ‘Come along, Isobel, we’ll go and see what’s for tea.’

  ‘See Damie,’ said Isobel, longingly. She had developed a passion for her ten-year-old uncle Jamie and took every opportunity to be in his company. She did not expect to participate in his games; proximity was enough. Often she just stood, gazing at him. Ruth thought that it was his age more than his gender which so fascinated the toddler: he was like a grown-up, only smaller. He was a gentle boy, but eager, his face already bearing signs of his father’s beakiness. Home for the holidays, he didn’t seem to mind when Isobel inadvertently knocked over his soldiers, or pulled the croquet hoops out of the lawn in the middle of a game.

  ‘We’ll see Jamie at tea time. He’s gone fishing, remember?’

  Ruth took her daughter’s hands and pulled her up. She hoped there would be fruit cake. She had been hungry for the whole of this pregnancy, except when she’d actually been sick. She had been feeling sick for five months now. Food brought temporary respite from the nausea, but nothing, not even vomiting, brought relief. And she was the size of a dairy cow.

  Ruth was altogether disgruntled. It wasn’t only the relentless nausea and the hefting of her uncompliant body about the place. There was also the fact that bed life was curtailed. During her first pregnancy, she and Harry had carried on blissfully throughout, adjusting to her increased size in increments, improvising. Until the end of the seventh month she had felt electrically sexy, as if every pore of her skin had voltage. This time the sickness meant she could not bring herself to kiss, for covering her mouth worsened the nausea, and it was joyless, making love without kissing. It was like going abroad and only seeing the sights recommended in a guidebook, without wandering about on your own, without happening on idiosyncratic pleasures: a little shop selling old-fashioned hats perhaps, or glass doll’s eyes, or plaster saints. There was some sense of achievement but it was impersonal, even mechanical. She could not enjoy it, could not lose herself, which made things difficult for Harry. They had rather given up. And she couldn’t really play the piano either because she was so big she could scarcely reach the keys and the pedals at the same time.

  Also there was the fact that when she and Isobel went home, it would not be to the flat in Pimlico, but to their new house in Putney. Harry had wanted to move further out, nearer his parents, and it meant that they could afford a real house, with a garden for the children – there was even an old apple tree with a swing – and fresher air. And yet Ruth was sad to leave Pimlico, where they had started their married life. She love
d the huge bathroom and being so close to everything, being able to walk to the Tate, and to meet her girlfriends in coffee shops. Also, she had hoped that having a second child would make theirs into a proper family of their own. Two and two: a household with its own habits and accumulating customs, with less obligation to see her in-laws every weekend. Their new proximity made such hope of separation dimmer.

  She found the Longdens less and less congenial as time went on.

  It worried her. She thought that her adoring of Harry should have spilled over to his relations, but instead her affection for them had receded. Their formality and routine, which had once reminded her, happily, of her grandparents – it seemed such a haven – now bored and irritated her. Could they never do anything new, or differently? And they were so smug, so convinced of their own rightness. They never forgot to be conventional, to serve stuffing with roast pork, or redcurrant jelly when it was roast lamb. Their views never deviated in even the slightest detail from those expressed in the Daily Telegraph. They never forgot their manners, but they weren’t kind. Every time she and Harry visited, she heard his parents criticise someone: the child of old friends, who had gone horribly wrong, or a former associate with money troubles, or some errant neigh-bour. Invariably her father-in-law would conclude, ‘Well, it’s not for us to judge.’ And there would be a little silence during which the family drew their collective breath complacently, blithely unaware that their harsh gossip was a kind of judgement, even if it was not followed by the passing of a sentence. She was not sure if they knew that Verity was having an affair with a married man, an anaesthetist at the hospital. At Mass, Ruth sometimes glanced across at her sister-in-law, as she closed her eyes in piety ready to receive the Host, and wondered. You were not supposed to take Holy Communion unless you were in a blameless state, a state of purity; this she had been taught during her Instruction. Perhaps adultery was only a sin for the actual adulterer, the person who was married. She did not have the heart to ask Harry.