‘Welcome to the world, Matilda Rose,’ Natalie said, and burst into tears.
6
Theatre
THE HEART OF the courtroom was an empty space. It was a modern facility, square, windowless, airless, the colour of dull metal. Tina was sitting overhead in the press gallery, watching the proceedings as if in the stalls at a particularly uncomfortable piece of contemporary theatre. Below her, the witnesses and lawyers were seated around the four sides of the chamber, facing each other.
To the left were the parents of Alice March, whose death at just nine months of age was the subject of the inquest. On the right were the medical professionals who had tried and failed to save Alice’s life. And directly beneath Tina, opposite the coroner on the far side of the court, was Kelly-Ann Rose, the eighteen-year-old nursery nurse who had made the mistake of giving Alice food that she shouldn’t have eaten, after which Alice had suffered an allergic reaction, turned blue and stopped breathing.
The proximity of the grieving mother and the girl whose mistake might or might not have contributed to the baby’s death filled the courtroom with an electrical charge that had nowhere to go until the verdict was announced and the inquest was over. The atmosphere was intensely claustrophobic, exhausting, deadening. Kelly-Ann looked grey and stiff, and the bags under her eyes were the colour of weak tea. Mrs March was the dry, worn white of old stone, as still and composed as a carving of a good wife on top of a medieval tomb. One was the picture of remorse, the other the picture of grief.
Accidents happen, Tina told herself. Anyone can make a mistake.
Whatever they had taught her at St Birinus School for Girls, the bundle of cells currently multiplying inside her was not a life.
She had resisted the morbid temptation to look up the extent to which it, the invading cell-bundle, had adopted human form, although she imagined that it probably looked amphibious, like a newt, something from a previous stage of evolution, crawling towards land. They had told her over the phone that an ultrasound would be necessary to establish how many weeks pregnant she was, but she wouldn’t have to see the scan.
Surely nobody ever wants to look, she’d said.
You’d be surprised, the woman from the clinic had told her. We’re all different, and we all have different reasons for the choices we make, and different ways of coping.
Tina had seen Natalie’s birth plan, a mission statement for Natalie’s desire not to be at the mercy of her body, but to direct what happened to it. The opportunities for Natalie to stamp her will on the natural process were limited, but still, she had set out what she wanted: gas and air, no interventions, water birth if possible.
And by now, more than a fortnight past Natalie’s due date, it must be over. Tina had texted to see if there was any news, and hadn’t yet heard back. She told herself that all was bound to be well, and found it was a guilty relief to put her concern about her friend to one side. The idea of Natalie as a new mother, settling her newborn at her breast, was a painful one, for reasons Tina didn’t particularly care to examine.
Tina, too, had had to select from a limited range of options. She had been guided primarily by the desire to have it over with as quickly as possible. So: a phone consultation, to be followed by a surgical procedure, in and out on the same day. No general anaesthetic, no sedation; that way she’d be able to leave as soon as she felt ready to walk. It would take all of five minutes, and then she’d be able to go home and crawl under her duvet and hide there until Saturday morning. When she would have to get up, put a brave face on it, and go to her father’s seventieth birthday party.
She was dreading what she had to do, but she was also resigned to it . . . though if the coroner didn’t reach his verdict soon, they’d all be back here again in the morning, and she’d miss her appointment. She’d almost forgotten what a time-consuming business reporting could be. She wouldn’t normally have been here at all, except they were short-staffed, and she was meant to be using it as the basis for a long article about the increasing prevalence of allergies, as well as producing a news story for the next day’s paper. Anyway, it would be thoroughly unprofessional to regard it as a junior, demeaning assignment. She was a staff writer; she wasn’t just a columnist. Plus it never hurt to keep your hand in.
She was half listening for facts or quotes that she might need, but most of what was emerging was clarification rather than wholly new information, and her note-taking had ground almost to a halt. They’d all been shut in together for the best part of two days, but still the coroner was taking his time, going back over some of the evidence from the previous day, asking for further details from the GP, the paediatrician, the paramedic, the A & E consultant.
Only Mr March, the baby’s father, had not been called upon to speak. His features were boyish, but shock and loss had robbed him of youthfulness, and he looked tired beyond either anger or despair. He was sitting very close to his wife; sometimes they held hands.
Tina had never seriously entertained the idea of telling Dan, or Justin, about the fix that one or other of them had got her in. She knew perfectly well how they would react if she did: there would be dismay, a desire to disbelieve, followed by concern – concern that she should get rid of it as quickly as possible, and terror that she might not. There was no point in lying, in telling either one that he was the only candidate for paternity – neither would want her to bear their child.
And why should they? If you wanted to have a child with someone, you went out with them, you lived with them, you got married. You didn’t hook up with them just the once after having a few too many down the pub and then move on to someone younger. And you didn’t keep them at your beck and call – but at a safe distance – for the best part of a decade, playing an occasional part in a long performance that had all the props of a love affair – the letters, the lingerie, the secret rendezvous, the intense reunions, the reluctant separations – and yet, at its heart, was all about what wasn’t there.
She had to face facts, she just wasn’t the mothering kind. Mothers were either staunch and dedicated like Lucy, or mild, gentle souls like Natalie. They were not bony-kneed, bitchy bigmouths like herself.
Finally! The verdict.
Time to concentrate. She might need to include something from the summing-up. She sat with her pen poised on her notebook, ready to start scribbling.
Accidental death.
Accidents happened. Even the law made allowances for that.
So why did she have this feeling that after she’d gone through with what she had to do tomorrow, she would never forgive herself?
Getting back to her flat was a relief, but a qualified one. Lately she’d become uncomfortably conscious of how badly she’d neglected the place, and as soon as she walked in through the front door it struck her as tatty and uncared-for.
How wonderful it would be, like the heroine in A Little Princess, to return to her garret one evening to find it warm, cosy, magically transformed. The fading paintwork, the heaps of books and papers, the dust: these were things that a month ago she would have been oblivious to. Now it was as if she’d lost her immunity, and there was nothing to protect her from seeing that her home was unloved.
The flat occupied the top two floors of a big Victorian house, with the living space and kitchen area upstairs in the converted attic, and a downstairs bathroom and bedroom. After she’d let herself in, the first thing she did was head to the bedroom and take off her work clothes: blouse, skirt and tights, which were de rigueur at the Post – opaques in winter, 10 denier in summer. Women in trousers, or with bare legs, were frowned on, whatever the weather, as were men with rolled-up shirtsleeves, or no tie. These were irksome restrictions, but Tina had spent seven years in the pea-green and dung-brown uniform of St Birinus, and the Post’s unofficial dress code was zany freedom in comparison.
Having stripped down to her underwear, she went over to the full-length mirror she had bought soon after starting at the Post, not for vanity, but as an act of pro
fessional self-protection. She used it to check for drooping hems, see-through shirts, fresh ladders and VPL – anything that might remind male colleagues to speculate about her body parts, or elicit a raised eyebrow from one of the artfully groomed lovelies on the fashion desk.
She turned sideways and examined her belly. A bit bloated, yes, but not too obvious. What would it be like to do this – to check for evidence that you were beginning to soften and swell – if it was a transformation you actually wanted? What if you had a man beside you, who wanted it too, who might even be proud of you? How blessed you would feel! But no . . . she couldn’t afford to think like that; it was much too close to self-pity. She’d brought this on herself, and now she had to square up to it like a . . . well, like a woman.
She turned again, and looked at herself head-on. Was her face beginning to look fractionally fuller? She was almost spilling out of her bra, and her breasts looked eerily creamy, as if milk was already blooming beneath the skin . . .
Ridiculous. It was a late period, that was the way to think of it, an escalation of hormones.
She rummaged in the chest of drawers for an old T-shirt and one of her looser pairs of jeans, pulled them on and opened up the wardrobe. She was a hoarder of clothes as well as of books and papers and photos, and it was beginning to look like a badly organized archive. There was plenty there that she hadn’t worn much lately – particularly among the going-out clothes, the sheer or shiny or brightly coloured tops and the short skirts and trousers from previous seasons.
There was the vampy stuff, too, a legacy of her relationship with Justin. Sooner or later she would have to have a clearout. She couldn’t think of another living soul in whose company it might be possible to wear leather hotpants, or a bustier, or an elasticated minidress that squeezed and squashed her into shape with all the efficacy of an old-fashioned girdle.
The top shelf of the wardrobe was given over to hats. The Ascot fascinator, the classic straw boater for Henley, and an array of others that she thought of as her disguise hats, used for her trips to Justin’s flat in Pimlico: the fur-trapper, the big knitted beret, the baker boy cap, the fedora.
There had been a time, years ago now, when Justin had been willing to come to her place. She’d made quite an effort to clean and tidy back then, and had bought a wrought-iron, king-sized bedstead that cost much more than she could afford, imagining it was the sort of thing a proper scarlet woman would recline on in order to ensnare her lover. She’d even gone to the trouble of getting a new cooker installed, so she could prepare seductive feasts. But then he had decided that regular visits were too risky, someone might recognize him, and it would be better by far for her to go discreetly to the studio he referred to as his bachelor pad, and cook dinner for him there. And so she had resigned herself to spending her evenings at home alone, and sleeping without companionship in the new hard, cold and spiky bed.
It had been all the excuse she needed to let things slide. Nobody else ever came round; when your friends were coupled up, and particularly when they had children, it was automatically assumed that they would be the hosts and you would be the visitor. And it hadn’t been difficult to dissuade her parents from coming? why on earth would they battle through the traffic to get to Clapham when she was more than happy to head west, away from central London, and visit them in Barnes? Anyway, she worked long hours . . . liked to keep fit . . . and, until very recently, had gone out a lot. She didn’t have time to nest.
She moved the Stetson sunhat to one side and took out the old wooden box that was hiding behind it.
The box had been made by a long-dead relative to store needlework, but it didn’t quite have the status of a family heirloom – it had been kept, not because it was valued for itself, but because it had a scrap of her father’s Great-Aunt Win’s handwriting glued to the inside of one of the inner lids, and that made it too personal to throw out.
Tina had found it in the loft as a teenager, and her mother had been surprised that she wanted it, but happy for her to keep it. Tina liked it precisely because of that hidden remainder of Winifred Fox. She’d been attracted to concealed mementoes and secret messages even then – had bought, second-hand, a heart-shaped, empty locket, before realizing she didn’t have a photo to put in it; kept a diary that opened with a key, and stored the diary, not quite in plain view, but on the bookshelf, inside the pages of the Children’s Encyclopaedia, while the key was in her jewellery box, with the cross she didn’t wear.
The lid of Great-Aunt Win’s box depicted a ship at sea, picked out in intricate marquetry, though the wood was so dark and scratched it was difficult to make it out. Inside was a top layer of small, individual compartments, each lined with red velvet and fitted with its own carefully wrought lid. Some still contained ancient cotton reels, buttons and embroidery silks, none of which had been touched for decades.
She lifted out the lid of the central compartment. On the reverse Great-Aunt Win had stuck a strip of paper, now brown with age, on which she had written, in spindly, copperplate handwriting, her name, the date – 1875 – and a declaration: Made by I alone.
Underneath was the pay-as-you-go mobile phone Justin had given Tina a year earlier, when he’d decided it was too risky to keep on contacting her on a number that someone might be able to trace. She still kept this phone switched on and charged up, and occasionally checked for messages. But he hadn’t called.
She put the phone away and lifted out the whole top layer.
The body of the box was tightly packed with letters; mixed in with them were the dried heads of half a dozen red roses that he had sent her after their first date. The petals were drier now than paper, the colour of old blood.
Then she had carefully hung them upside down so they would keep their shape. Now she thought: Only six?
She picked out an envelope at random. She didn’t know quite what she was looking for. Well, she did. It was the sign-off: love . . .
At first he had written to her often, but as time went on and he became more nervous about exposure he’d increasingly relied on the phone. Still, it had always reassured her to look back, to be able to hold something his hand had touched, to have something of him to keep.
She had looked in the box whenever she’d doubted him; as she grew older and began not only to realize that he really was never going to leave his wife, but also to suspect that his insistence on caution was just a means of maintaining control, his letters had restored her faith in him. And she had looked again when the strategies and ruses that were once heart-rending and thrilling in equal measure had become first a drag, and then habit and routine.
His handwriting was beautiful, of course.
Dear Vixen,
There’s no point being alive if you’re not prepared to take risks. Calculated risks, by all means, but still, what’s the point of anything if there’s nothing worth taking chances for?
Well, he would say that. Wouldn’t he?
But there was no way she could keep this baby. Was there?
She put the letter back into its envelope and tucked it away – gently, as if putting something to sleep – replaced the top layer, put the box back in the top of the wardrobe and went upstairs. It was time to eat, whether she felt like it or not.
Usually she treated cooking for herself as a worthwhile investment in her wellbeing. After all, she needed to maintain her health and energy levels in order to perform well at work. But ever since she’d seen the blue line come up on the pregnancy test – and then on the next one, and the one after that – she hadn’t felt like bothering with her favourite recipes. So it had been noodles, pizza, takeout all the way, fast food, stodge that would satisfy her hunger.
She’d let her exercise schedule lapse, too. Normally she swam three times a week, religiously, literally religiously, given that she’d become a keen competitive swimmer at about the same time she’d experienced a slow dawning of scepticism, a gradual awakening into what she thought of as reason, though her mother regarded it as
a foolish, self-spiting rebellion, a wilful rejection of the self-evident truth of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. (Her father, more subtle about these things, said only that if Tina was ever sorry about turning her back on the Church, it would probably be too late.)
Swimming hadn’t been thought much of at St Birinus – too individualistic, apart from relay races. Hockey was the sport in which excellence was most highly prized – team-spirited, and potentially punitive to boot. Still, Tina had scored a couple of trophies, and she’d kept up the habit when she left home for university and stopped going to Mass. What she liked most about it was how, after fifty lengths, you were conscious only of your body, and when you got out, you felt as clean and clear as if you’d just been forgiven.
It wasn’t just her good habits she’d given up since she’d found out she was pregnant; she’d been giving her vices a miss, too. She’d had to chuck out the best part of a bottle of white because it had been in the fridge too long, and even smoking had lost its appeal.
While her pasta was simmering she wandered over to the framed photo montage displayed on the chimney breast, composed of old pictures of her friends. Right in the middle was the one of her with Lucy and Natalie on the beach on New Year’s Eve, 1999, all fresh-faced and hopeful. There was no sign of the typical posed group photo awkwardness. They were huddling together for the photo as if they were happy to be close to each other.
Stop the Clock Page 9