Living With It

by Lizzie Enfield

  I wish I had as much purpose as he does.

  If I did, I might have got further with finding a solicitor than I have by the time Eric gets home, angry and spoiling for a fight.

  ‘What have you been doing all day?’ he asks.

  I still find it hard to explain to Eric how my days seem to disappear before me, the way they always have since having children. I can’t quite work out myself how he can travel up to London and back and do more than a full day’s work in the interim, in the time that I seem to get very little done at all.

  I used to pack so much into my days, before I had kids – into a day’s work.

  ‘I helped in Vincent’s class this morning.’ I don’t mention my swim. ‘And I asked a couple of parents but they weren’t very helpful.’

  ‘What about the man who made our will?’

  ‘I’d forgotten about him.’ I had, almost entirely, but now he came back to me. It had seemed slightly morbid at the time, making a will, like anticipating your own death, but after Vinnie was born we felt we needed to make one, in case something happened to us. There were adverts running on the local radio station at the time saying something like, ‘If you don’t have a will, you won’t get to decide who becomes the legal guardian for your children.’

  With three children, we thought we should make a definite plan.

  I was panicky when I was pregnant with Vincent, not unlike the way I was with Gabby, wondering how I was going to cope, if I could manage with three. I wasn’t a natural parent, I knew that much, and the prospect of three scared me just as much as one had done, especially as I had to keep such a close eye on Harvey because of his nut allergy.

  But Vincent was the easiest, sunniest, most delightful baby and still is the easiest, most charming, delightful child. I loved the other two, with a fierceness that surprised me, but I fell in love with Vincent in a way I would never admit to anyone. Maybe it was because he was the baby. Maybe I’d have felt the same way about Harvey if we’d stopped at two and he’d have been more my baby and less Eric’s boy.

  Perhaps Vincent’s conception was auspicious, even though all through my pregnancy it was a great source of tension between Eric and me. The pregnancy was an accident but these things are never entirely accidental, and I’d blamed my husband.

  The fog had just started to lift. Gabs had started school; Harvey was going to nursery several mornings a week and loving it. Both seemed happy and had adapted well to their new surroundings. I had a little time to myself. I hadn’t really done anything with it but I’d begun thinking again, which seemed like a start.

  That evening, Eric came home early, with a bottle of wine and a takeaway, in time to help me bath the children and put them to bed. With no dinner to prepare, the evening stretched out ahead of us.

  ‘Do you want to watch anything?’ Eric asked as we settled on the sofa.

  ‘I’m not bothered.’ That was my usual response. I no longer actively watched television, I just sat in front of it and let it wash over me, allowed it to relax me slightly with a stream of home improvement or cookery programmes.

  Eric often took my not being bothered as a chance to take in every detail of a documentary about an undercover Allied mission in Libya during the war. I am always amazed by the amount of detail men retain, with regard to world affairs, history and sport – and how little with regard to their families. I’m not sure Eric knows what the children’s middle names are. But he knows the middle name of every commander in the Arab campaign, taking them in from various TV documentaries and retaining them as if they were important to his life.

  But that evening Eric switched the television off.

  ‘I’m going to look at you instead, then, Isobel,’ he said, moving towards me and kissing me.

  He surprised me and, as I said, the fog was beginning to lift. I felt less tired and less anxious and I was grateful to Eric for the takeaway and the wine and still finding me sexy, even though most of the time I felt anything but.

  So I relaxed into his kiss, but not quite enough that I could stop myself saying, ‘Not here,’ when he began to undress me, there, on the sofa in the living room.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, and carried on unbuttoning my shirt, kissing me again so I could not speak.

  ‘Because the kids might come down.’

  ‘When do they ever come down?’ Eric had undone all the buttons of my shirt now and was fumbling with the clasp of my bra.

  ‘My period finished today,’ I told him.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You said this morning.’

  Maybe that was the reason for the early homecoming, the takeaway and the wine. I resented the planning slightly but I’d been so tired most of the time, I guess he needed to plan, and, now that we were both standing semi-clothed in the sitting room and Eric was pulling me to him, I wanted him.

  It was nice until the moment Eric came, and then I was angry in an instant.

  ‘I told you not to come inside me!’

  ‘I thought you told me I could. I thought it was OK.’

  ‘No, I said don’t come inside me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bel.’ Eric was apologetic but not unduly worried. ‘I wasn’t really listening. I thought you said I could but it doesn’t matter. You’ve only just finished your period.’

  ‘I hope so, for your sake,’ I said, unable to stop myself spoiling the mood, and anxious despite the fact that I knew Eric was probably right.

  But he wasn’t.

  Two weeks later I began to feel pregnant. A few weeks afterwards, a test confirmed that I was. I resented Eric all the way through the pregnancy, blamed him for getting me pregnant, forgot that our baby had been conceived in a moment of love and passion.

  And of course it meant I didn’t go back to work. I’d had no definite plans to, but it was a sort of unspoken option. It was what people did: had two children, then worked again.

  ‘Isobel just gets pregnant every time there’s a danger she might have to go back to work,’ Eric joked once. He was laughing as he said it, but I suspected there was an undercurrent of resentment and it triggered the guilt I felt about not working. I wanted to be at home with the children, and I did appreciate the fact that Eric never pushed me to go back. But he must have known that I felt bad about him having to shoulder the responsibility of being the sole breadwinner.

  Eric was reasonably happy in his work, at the time Vinnie was conceived. He was working on the news desk at the Guardian. It wasn’t very well paid but he liked the paper and the atmosphere and hoped it would lead to other things. But when an old colleague brought the job as a sub on the Daily News to Eric’s attention I pushed him to apply for it. The salary was almost twice what he was getting. It wasn’t a job he wanted but needs must, I argued. And he went for it, got it and took it.

  And now he hates it, and he probably resents me for urging him to take it.

  Ben, Monday evening

  There is still a peculiar silence to our home. It always used to be otherwise. The radio would be on, one of our iPods docked and playing in the kitchen, Maggie practising or listening to music, me pontificating, both of us talking to or about Iris. Without either of us making a conscious decision to shroud the house in silence, it’s crept up on us.

  Why don’t we still put the radio on as soon as one of us wakes up? It’s what we used to do, always: first the alarm by our bed and then, whoever went downstairs to make coffee would flick the switch of the leather Roberts model in the kitchen, an original rather than one of the replicas which are everywhere these days, a legacy from Maggie’s mum who, although still alive, seems determined to divest herself of all her worldly goods.

  Ruth comments on the quiet when Maggie is upstairs bathing Iris. She’s come to stay for a few days to look after the baby while Maggie goes for a meeting with the manager of her orchestra. There is a fairly short European tour coming up, just before Christmas. They want Maggie to rejoin them but she’s not ready and hasn’t practised for weeks. But she wants to talk to t
hem, explain how things are. And the following day we have an appointment at the audiology unit. We’d rather not take Iris. So Maggie’s mum being here is helpful, but she also brings with her her concerns.

  ‘Has she played yet?’ Ruth asks, when Maggie takes Iris upstairs. ‘You said she’d stopped since the diagnosis.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not while I’ve been here,’ I tell her. ‘I think it’s taken away the pleasure.’

  ‘Iris will have a sense of the music,’ Ruth says to me then. ‘She might not be able to hear what you will hear, but she’ll feel something.’

  I anticipate what she is going to say next and take a deep breath. It’s another thing people have said often enough before, and they mean well when they say it but it doesn’t help, and I don’t want to have to keep listening to people saying it.

  ‘Did you ever see that film about the deaf woman? I don’t remember its name?’

  ‘Children of a Lesser God,’ I tell her. ‘The one with an award-winning deaf actress?’

  ‘If you say so.’ Ruth seems undaunted by my snappy tone. ‘My point is, she couldn’t hear the music but she could feel it. Maybe it will be the same for Iris. Don’t you think you could persuade Maggie to play some time?’

  ‘I can’t make Maggie do something she doesn’t want to do,’ I say, tersely.

  ‘Well, maybe she does want to.’ Ruth raises her voice to me then, not just the way she sometimes does because her hearing is beginning to fail with age, but because she’s starting to get angry.

  ‘She doesn’t, Ruth. I’m not stopping her. She doesn’t want to play. Why does she play? To give people pleasure from the music she makes when she does. Who would she most like to be able to hear that music? Our daughter, who can’t. Therefore she doesn’t want to play.’

  ‘Or maybe she’s tiptoeing around you, rather than Iris,’ Ruth almost shouts.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It isn’t only Maggie who is not playing, is it? It’s you too. It’s too quiet. It’s as if you’ve decided that if Iris can’t hear then no one else is going to get to listen to anything either, and that doesn’t help, Ben. It doesn’t help anyone.’

  Ruth’s never spoken to me like this before.

  We both fall silent.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean to speak out of turn. But you have to stop seeing Iris’s deafness as a loss. Her place in the world and the way she sees it is different now, yes, but she still has a place, and she’ll still see the world as something which delights her as much as everyone else. You have to accept that.’

  ‘I can’t, Ruth,’ I say to her, and I can see the disappointment on her face, a look which tells me she’d thought more of me. ‘You’re not the first person to say what you’ve just said. It’s not a novel idea that Iris’s world is different, not necessarily worse. I’ve tried to make myself believe that, but I can’t. I don’t. It’s not right. It’s not what I wanted for her.’

  I don’t say ‘it’s not fair’, I don’t want to sound too petulant, but I think it.

  ‘We don’t always get what we want, Ben,’ Ruth says more gently. ‘Especially where children are concerned. You get what you are given. You have a beautiful, healthy – yes, healthy – baby daughter. So she can’t hear, not like the rest of us. I know you’re taking legal action and I can’t say I agree with that, but it’s none of my business if that’s what you want to do. But Maggie is my business, and she’s not happy not playing. Don’t force your view of things on her.’

  ‘I’m doing it for Maggie and Iris,’ I say.

  ‘Are you?’ Ruth looks at me keenly. ‘If you asked me, I would say you were doing it for yourself, Ben. I don’t mean that to be critical. If it helps you come to terms with what’s happened, then by all means go ahead and sue your friends. Just don’t lose sight of Maggie in all of this.’

  Maggie comes down then, with Iris wrapped in a towel, her sleepy face peeping out from its folds, interrupting my ‘chat’ with her mother.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ Ruth replies. ‘Would you mind if I put the radio on? I’d like to hear the news.’

  Isobel, Monday evening

  ‘Jesus, why is this drawer such a mess?’ Eric asks.

  He is rummaging through a drawer in the kitchen, the one in which you find all the stuff that has no other home: glue, Sellotape, batteries, string, duplicate keys, old camera films and instruction manuals for various household appliances.

  ‘What do you need?’ I ask, but he is still perturbed by the state of the drawer.

  ‘There’s bloody drawing pins all over everything.’ He turns to show me a ball of Blu-tack with pins protruding from it. ‘Why aren’t they in a box or something?’

  ‘The pot must have lost its lid,’ I say, as evenly as I can.

  Really, the state of the drawer is neither here nor there. I know this. Eric knows too, but for now this is what he is choosing to fight about.

  ‘Maybe some time when you’re at home all day you could sort it out so I can actually find what I’m looking for,’ he snaps.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I ask, refusing to rise to the bait.

  ‘Our will,’ Eric says. ‘Where do we keep our will?’

  ‘In the desk upstairs,’ I tell him, and he slams the offending drawer shut and goes upstairs.

  We have a desk in our bedroom. Eric sometimes uses it to work on at weekends. At some point, I’d had the vague notion that it would be my spot for doing whatever work I could do. Now, it’s just a chunky oak reminder that I don’t do anything.

  ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  My husband goes upstairs.

  I enjoyed the will-making process when we sat down and did it. We were happy then. I was calmer after Vincent was born, entranced by his easy nature which seemed to make everything seem better and easier. Making a will felt like renewing our marriage vows, without the tacky connotations. It was a time for stocktaking, realising what we had together, not just physical assets like our house, which in reality belonged mostly to the building society, but three small children.

  The solicitor, Roberto – I remember his name now, although Eric is upstairs looking for it – asked if we wanted champagne when we came in to sign it. It seemed an odd suggestion but we said yes and we celebrated, not the anticipation of our deaths, but the realisation of what we had.

  ‘Fucking hell, Isobel!’ Eric comes down the stairs again, his face like thunder.

  I look around, even though I am alone in the kitchen. It’s an automatic reaction when someone swears. I look out for the kids, ready to tell them to cover their ears. But they are all upstairs. Gabs in her room, the boys playing darts in Harvey’s. I can hear the thud thud thud as the darts hit the board or the wall and then the floor when they don’t go in. I’m listening out for screams should anything go wrong. I never wanted him to have a dartboard, it was hard enough steering Harvey clear of nuts without having to worry about darts as well, but Eric’s opinion – ‘You can’t wrap him up in cotton wool for the rest of his life’ – prevailed.

  ‘What?’ I look up as Eric enters the room, waving several pieces of paper. ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘Yes, I found it.’ He spits out the words. ‘And I found these.’ He pushes the offending documents into my hand and it takes me a moment to realise what they are. Blue copies of documents, where the top copies have been retained by someone else. The name of the vet’s surgery printed at the top.

  We only had pets for a brief couple of years – two rabbits, which Gabriella begged us to get and then took very little interest in. They were both eaten by foxes one afternoon when she let them out to play in the garden and forgot to lock them up again. She was distraught at the time, but we didn’t let her have any more. Neither Eric nor I were really pet people. We’d tried it, for the sake of the children, and decided we’d failed.

  I look at the documents closely, trying to decipher the handwriting that is scrawled below the
address. The only thing that is really clear is that this is the copy of a bill. I wonder if it was the amount that has made Eric angry, although the date on it is nearly ten years ago, too long ago for him to be cross about, whatever I’d spent on rabbits.

  ‘I can’t quite work out what it says?’ I look at Eric questioningly.

  ‘Can’t you? Can’t you remember? Don’t you remember why you made an appointment and took two pet rabbits to the vet?’

  I look again.

  The bill is for the rabbits’ vaccinations against some virus which might have killed them. I remember weighing up the cost at the time, when the vet suggested they have them, thinking it was too much, but hearing only, ‘It’s carried by birds and if they get it they have a quite a prolonged slow death. It’s not very nice,’ then, seeing Gabriella’s face begin to crumple in anticipation of the death of her pets, writing out a cheque.

  I nod slowly.

  ‘You had the fucking rabbits vaccinated, Isobel.’

  I know Eric is not joking, the way he used to in the past when the ‘fucking rabbits’ were alive. I think that was why I’d taken them to the vet in the first place, to get them ‘sexed’ to make sure they weren’t going to be fucking rabbits and leave us with more rabbits on our hands that we knew what to do with.

  ‘You had the fucking rabbits vaccinated, but not our own children.’

  Ben, Monday night

  Maggie is asleep, and I am not tired but in bed, as Ruth is sleeping on the sofabed in the living room.

  It’s never easy being on the receiving end of criticism from your motherin-law, but there is an element of truth in what she said.

  OK, so it had taken a bit of head-adjusting to get used to the fact that I was going to have a baby. Not only that, I was having one with a woman I didn’t really know that well and wasn’t even living with.

  But I had been strangely and genuinely excited by the unexpected turn my life had taken. I was going to have a child. Maggie was going to move in with me. Me, Ben, the person who’d spent the last twenty-plus years being unable to commit to a long-term relationship, largely because I thought I didn’t want to have kids. I was committing to someone and I was having a child.